Dante Valentine

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Which was, to put it kindly, a shambles. The furniture was destroyed, chairs and tables smashed, the holovid player shattered, and a large imprint rammed into the wall between the suite and the bedroom. Japhrimel was still nowhere in evidence; I wondered where he’d gone. “Sekhmet sa’es, I slept through this?”

  “You been sleepin’ a lot, chica. Even on your feet. It ain’t like you.” Lucas jerked his chin at a shape lying on the floor by the nivron fireplace. It was McKinley, bleeding from the nose and ears and gagged with an anonymous bit of cloth held down with magtape, trussed with a thin golden chain that shivered and smoked in the light from the upended lamp. The carpeted floor groaned under him as he caught sight of me and started to struggle.

  Leander, now shaven-cheeked, his accreditation tat twisting under his skin, nodded from the windowsill. He stood with one hip hitched up against the sill, his sword shoved into his belt and a plasgun in his right hand, peering down into the street below. His dark hair was wildly mussed. “Hi, Danny.” His tone was excessively even. “Sorry I had to bail, I thought it best I didn’t stick around after the demon warned me off.” His emerald sparked, and one corner of his mouth pulled down.

  Warned you off? What the hell? I contented myself with a noncommittal noise. “Mh. What the hell’s that?” I pointed at McKinley, whose black eyes narrowed. He was either furious or terrified, I couldn’t tell. A whiff of burning cinnamon and dry naptha scented the air, as if his glands had opened to pour out chemical reek.

  “The demon left him here, probably to watch out for Sleeping Beauty.” Leander sighed, shrugging, but his dark eyes flicked nervously over the room as if expecting company any moment. “Let’s go, the back of my neck’s itching.”

  So was mine. Left him here? What the hell? It wasn’t like Japhrimel to leave me alone. Where the hell was he?

  The last time Japh had left while I was unconscious, it was to go into Hell and start the process of dragging me back into a huge mess full of demons. One happy little home in the Toscano hills burned to smoking rubble in a reaction fire and my life crashing down around my ears again.

  What was he doing now?

  “What’s Japh been doing, Lucas?” My hand dropped to a knifehilt as I contemplated McKinley, who went absolutely still. He was bruised all over his face and I was sure one shoulder was dislocated by the way it rotated too far back. This was twice Lucas had faced down a Hellesvront agent and come away the winner.

  I am so glad I hired him. Well, technically, Eve started out hiring him, but I’m glad he’s working for me. With a clear-cut emergency in front of me, I felt better than I had since I’d received Gabe’s message.

  Gabe.

  I pushed away the thought of her broken body, the emerald dark and lifeless in her pale cheek. Focus, Danny. Goddammit, focus! Broken plasilica ground into the carpet under my boots. The dangling almost-chandelier light fixture had been yanked out of the ceiling. The wet bar was a chaos of broken glass and the simmering stink of alcohol, reminding me of DMZ Sarajevo. A shiver bolted up my spine, was ruthlessly quelled.

  “There’s another demon in town, and word is your green-eyed boy is tracking it down, as well as some other interestin’ shit. I got you an interview with a Magi who might know what the fuck’s goin’ on.” Lucas shrugged. “Let’s get the hell out of here. The whole fuckin’ city’s seething. Something about a dead Necromance and your name tangled up together. I can’t leave you alone for a fuckin’ minute, can I?”

  Gabe. So someone knows. Chill fury boiled up behind my breastbone again, was suppressed. “Guess not.” I drew a knife with my right hand. McKinley’s black eyes met mine, and he strained against the gag, making a low muffled anonymous noise.

  One problem at a time. Japhrimel was hunting Eve’s rebellion here in Santiago City. Why hadn’t he told me?

  You must trust me to do what you cannot, then. Japhrimel’s voice, even and chill. He rarely said anything he didn’t mean.

  And here I thought he came along because I needed him. Silly me. Yellow bitterness coated the back of my throat. Stupid and blind, Danny. He’s doing the same thing he did before, going behind my back.

  Of course. Why expect him not to? It was what he did. Too bad I was only finding out now.

  The knife flicked from my right hand, burying itself in the carpeted floor with a chuk, less than an inch from McKinley’s nose. He flinched, barely but perceptibly, and I tried not to feel the hot, nasty wave of satisfaction curling through me. You told Japh it was better to tie me up and do whatever he wanted, didn’t you? And he left you here alone with me. You son of a bitch. No wonder you work for demons.

  “Tell Japhrimel,” I said quietly. “Tell him exactly what I am about to say, McKinley. If he comes after Eve, he’s going to have to get through me first.”

  That spurred the agent to frantic motion, twisting like a landed fish inside the thin golden chain. I didn’t even want to know what it was made of. Another desperate smothered noise pressed against the gag as his eyes rolled.

  My thumb caressed the katana’s guard as I stared down at him. The blade thrummed, hungry inside its sheath.

  Lucas pushed me. “That won’t hold him forever. Come on.”

  You’re right. I don’t have time for this, I have other hovers to fly. There was a time when the thought of Lucas Villalobos touching me would have made my skin crawl with frantic loathing and send me scrabbling for a weapon to protect myself. He was dangerous, as dangerous as a big venomous snake or a Mob Family Head. Just because he hadn’t bitten me yet didn’t mean he wasn’t going to.

  But along with being dangerous, Lucas was professional. He was indisputably working for me—and in any case I was no longer human. I was fairly sure I could outrun him. Besides, he’d taken on the Devil for me. Something like that will make a girl feel mighty charitable even when it comes to Villalobos.

  Leander ducked out the window onto the fire escape, I did too. At least the window wasn’t shattered. Someone was going to owe the hotel a bundle for that room—the noise had probably already been remarked.

  Outside, the night was cool and cloudy, orange glowing on the clouds and hovers moving in silent formation overhead. The cuff was heavy on my left wrist above my datband; I wondered if Japhrimel had put it on me before he’d left. While I’d been dead to the world, unconscious or tranced into a high-alpha state.

  Dreaming of Jace. Or not-dreaming.

  The Gauntlet shimmered, my skin crawling underneath it. It bothered me more than I wanted to admit. I wanted to stop and peel the damn thing off again, but we had precious little time and I didn’t want to have my hands full of jewelry if the other shoe dropped.

  “So where are we going?” I asked Lucas, who had taken a position just behind my left shoulder, watching my back and scanning the street in front of us at the same time. “Where’s this Magi?”

  “In the Tank District,” Lucas said easily. “Just follow Leander, chica. We’ll get you there.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Anwen Carlyle lived in a rickety, filthy apartment building in the Tank District; and not a nice part of the Tank either. This close to the Bowery, the worst festering sore in the middle of the Tank, the air was full of pain. Bloodlust, desperation, Chillfreaks, pimps, hookers, Mob runners, and other human flotsam congregated there. The Tank is where you go if you’re a rich technoyuppie slumming, or a bounty hunter looking to connect with the shadow side. It’s also where you don’t go if you want to get through the evening without a fight. It isn’t as bad as the Core in Manhattan or the Darkside in Paradisse, but it’s bad enough. The urban renewal that had gone through Trivisidiro hadn’t visited this part of the Tank, it was likely none ever would. This close to the Rathole where the sk8 tribes congregated, renewal wasn’t a priority. Survival was.

  The smell inside the sloping tenement was incredible: dirty diapers, piss, desperation, food cooked on little personal plasfires. “What the hell’s a Magi doing here?” I asked, quietly enough, as I followed Lucas
up the stairs. There was an elevator, but it didn’t work. I didn’t mind, even through the titanic stink of human despair and dying cells. I’d rather smell stink than be caught in an elevator, unable to breathe as claustrophobe terror crawls down my throat. “She can’t make rent?”

  Leander, behind me, made a low snickering sound. “Taken in by appearances?” His tone was light, a welcome distraction from the close dank quarters that almost triggered latent claustrophobia. My sword was heavy in my hand, and the cuff was chill against my skin.

  I ignored the itching, nagging desire to take the thing off again. “Lucas?”

  His bloody sleeve flopped as he climbed the stairs with shambling grace. “Anwen don’t like company, chica. But she owes me.”

  I shivered at the thought of what a Magi might owe Lucas. I wondered if he liked to keep a few debts in reserve, for just such an emergency. My skin chilled at the thought of the price he usually demanded from a psion, anyone with Talent would have to be really desperate to hire him.

  Japhrimel had paid him. What would a demon pay the Deathless?

  I decided I could live without knowing. “Great. So she owes you.” I looked at the intaglio of graffiti rioting over the walls in permaspray. Most of the lights were broken or burned out. The ones that remained gave enough of a glow I could see every crack and splinter, every patched and unpatched hole in the wall, every small bit of trash and scuttling cockroach. Demon eyes need a few photons to work with, not like Nichtvren and their uncanny ability to see in total dark.

  The thought of Nichtvren sent another shiver up my back. For some reason they scare me more than demons. It’s an atavistic fear; a human fear of something higher up the food chain. It’s also completely unrealistic, a demon will kill you quicker. But I was more scared of suckheads. Go figure.

  Let’s just get this over with so I can go talk to Abra and start untangling this mess. Impatience rose; I pushed it down. I didn’t want to be here in the Tank, I wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere else, tracking down a killer.

  Gabe’s killer, Eddie’s killer. I had revenge to get started with. But if I could also find out exactly what Japh was up to, I had to at least try.

  What wasn’t he telling me, and where the hell was he? I didn’t like my protection—the only protection I was certain of—vanishing while the inside of my head turned into a bad holovid show. I was sinking fast, as usual, without any clue what the hell was going on now.

  Well, we’re here to figure some of it out, aren’t we? A Magi who owes Lucas. Let’s hope she has something useful to tell me.

  We reached the sixth floor, Lucas and Leander both breathing a little more raggedly than usual. My own breath came deep and slow, the mark on my shoulder pulsing softly with Power, I wasn’t winded in the least.

  “One thing,” Lucas wheezed. He smelled like copper, dried blood, and the dry throat-stinging tang of a stasis cabinet, under a screen of male effort and stale sweat. “Try not to scare her, Valentine.”

  “I’ll do my best.” My left hand tightened on my sword. “Why anyone’s scared of me when you’re around…” Good gods above, I’m actually bantering with Lucas Villalobos. Christer Hell must be frozen over by now.

  Amazingly, he gave a whistling, wheezing laugh as he pushed the heavy fire door open. I saw a glimmer down at the end of the hall—shields, powerful subtle shields. “I’m a reasonable man, Valentine. You ain’t.”

  Not reasonable, or not a man? I feel pretty damn reasonable, considering my best friend was just murdered and the man I love won’t give me a straight answer when it comes to the Prince of Hell and why I’m suddenly such a high-priced chip in this goddamn game. “I’m reasonable,” I muttered darkly. “Considering everything that’s going on, I’m pretty damn reasonable.” My throat was dry, my voice soft and seductive in the dark despite or maybe because of my damaged trachea.

  “Hear, hear.” Leander bumped into me, maybe his human eyes couldn’t pierce the dark like mine could. He still smelled like sand and the thick langorously-spiced coffee of Cairo Giza under the cloak of dying cells that meant human.

  I wondered why the smell sent such a frisson of distaste up my back. I liked him, didn’t I? And Lucas’s dry stasis-cabinet scent was no better.

  “Shut up, deadhead,” Lucas snarled. He seemed to have no trouble navigating over the debris in the hall—soymalt bottles, empty takeout cartons, rancid clothing, other shapeless bits of stuff. “I do the talkin’ here.”

  “Leave him alone.” My own tone was flat and bored. “He knows enough to keep his mouth shut when dealing with an edgy Magi.” Although how dangerous a Magi who chooses to live in a dump like this is, I won’t venture to guess.

  Villalobos didn’t dignify that with an answer. We reached the end of the hall, apartment 6A; he knocked once, twisted the knob, and pushed the door wide.

  Well, that’s interesting. I watched the shimmering layers of Power shunt aside from his aura, magickal energy refusing to touch him. It was something I’d noticed about Lucas, he didn’t use Power himself, but it couldn’t be used against him either. An impasse, and food for thought… if I could figure out what to think about it.

  A breath of kyphii-scented air puffed out, caressed the hall. I followed Lucas, stepping nervously through a cascading sheet of energy that parted to let me through before flushing a deep beautiful rose-spangled gold as whoever inhabited this place felt the Power flux change around me. Female. Magi. Not too young, but not old. I took a deep breath, all the way down to the bottom of my lungs, tasting the air as if I was on a bounty. Leander followed, sweeping the door shut behind him, and we found ourselves in a hardwood-floored entryway, smelling mellowly of beeswax, kyphii, and Power.

  Anubis et’her ka, she’s powerful, whoever she is. The shields were carefully done, a subtle taint of demon spice threading through them telling me she was an active, demon-dealing Magi.

  Like “Shaman”, “Magi” is a catch-all term for a wide range of variously-talented psions. A Magi might or might not know what to do with a demon when it pops up, depending on their study—and depending on the demon. Magi have been trafficking with Hell since before the Awakening, but before that great collective human leap forward in psionic and magickal Power, their methods had been spotty and uneven at best. Still, when the Awakening happened, the Magi were the only ones who had an idea of how to train psionic talent, or a framework for making Power behave. Nowadays all psions are Magi-trained in memory, Power-handling, and theory of magick, but that doesn’t make us all Magi.

  I knew how to call up an imp and constrain it in a circle now; I knew how to consecrate tools to be used in closing an etheric portal into Hell and send a Low Flight demon back, I even knew a few more things about demon anatomy than I had before. But demon-dealing Magi are secretive in the extreme, committing information about their successful experiments in breaking the walls between our world and Hell to only one apprentice at a time and writing their shadowjournals—the equivalent of a Skinlin’s mastersheets or a Ceremonial’s grimoire—in codes that could take months to break. Even if they work with circles, they don’t share many of their private secrets, and I couldn’t lay my hands on the great books of magick the accepted circles had access to. Another impasse, this one frustrating in the extreme because I needed to know more about what I was.

  What Japhrimel had made me.

  The inside of the apartment was a surprise. It held no trace of clutter or poverty; the floor was polished hardwood and the walls painted varying shades of rose, pale pink, and white. Lucas led us into a living room decorated with an altar draped in silver cloth and sporting a three-foot-tall statue of Ganej the Magnificent, the elephant god. There was a restrained fainting-couch done in rose velvet and a Vircelia print on the wall, an original if my eyes didn’t fool me, and the windows were cloaked with heavy silken drapes.

  Ganej. The Remover of Obstacles. Odd, but an effective choice now that I think about it. What better way to break the barriers between here and Hel
l than with the help of a god who surmounts barricades? The statue was an antique, creamy marble veined with gold, and thrumming with Power. So this Magi took her god seriously, as seriously as I took mine.

  I cautiously decided to reserve judgment.

  There was a click from the doorway opposite the one we’d come in through, and my sword left the sheath in a singing blur as I stepped instinctively in front of Leander.

  After all, I knew I could take more damage.

  The Magi, a slim caramel-skinned woman with long dark-brown hair and a pair of wide gray eyes, stared at us. She held a very nice 9 mm Glockstryke projectile gun in her right hand, her stance braced and professional. She was pretty in an unremarkable way that wasn’t helped along by the design of her tat, which wasn’t flowing or graceful; she’d chosen an angular Varjas design, like a Ceremonial. It didn’t do a thing for her face, being too thick-lined and sharp. But her aura flamed with Power; she was strong for a human.

  Gods, did I just think that? I’m human too. I am. “Drop the gun, girl. Or I’ll make you eat it.” My voice stroked the drapes, made the walls groan.

  “Fuck me with a hover,” she breathed, her gray eyes flicking from Lucas to me, settling on me, and widening. The gun dipped slightly, ended up pointing at the floor. She wore jeans and a pretty blue wide-sleeved, square-necked shirt embroidered with Canon runes around the collar and cuffs. “This is your client, Villalobos?” The high edge of fear colored her voice, and a rill of excitement slid down my back. Her aura jittered slightly, her dread coloring the air like wine.

  It wasn’t quite as drunkening as Polyamour the sexwitch’s fear, but it was still pleasant. Because Carlyle’s terror was tinted with the edge of attraction, a promise that filled the air like the smell of anything fragrant and good, and comprehension flowered in those wide-spaced, rainy-gray eyes.