Dante Valentine

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Blood bubbled on the man’s lips. His eyes widened frantically. I saw gold-touched stubble on his cheeks, a crooked front tooth, the fine fan of his eyebrows. He’d just taken a job, after all. He was just a mercenary.

  What am I doing?

  I let out a short guttural sound and freed my right hand, hooking my fingers; my claws extended as I made a quick sharp almost-backhand movement. Blood gushed free, but I’d already pushed him away. The arterial spray missed me, and in any case, he was bleeding so badly internally it wasn’t like he had much blood pressure left.

  I tore away from under the sedayeen’s touch. Had I not noticed her approach or had she slipped under my magscan because she was a healer, and harmless? Sedayeen are incapable of harming anyone without horrific feedback, they are the swanhilds of the psionic world, helpless pacifists without the natural advantage of poisonous flesh ’hilds have. Sedayeen survived by attaching themselves to the more powerful in the paranormal or psionic world, and they were valuable enough to their protectors to avoid the near-extinction sexwitches had suffered in the chaos just after the Awakening.

  She was dressed in a faded PhenFighters T-shirt and a pair of jeans, Silmari sandals on her small feet. Short spiked brown hair stood up from her well-modeled head, and a wide pair of muddy brown eyes met mine. She had a triangular face like most healers, a sharp chin and a cupid’s-bow of a mouth. Her accreditation tat was the characteristic ankh of the sedayeen, this one with an additional short bar through the vertical line and a small pair of wings. She wore a hemp choker with turquoise beads, and looked only about sixteen or so. But then, sedayeen age well. It probably meant she was around thirty.

  The Shaman, a taller woman with her blonde hair braided back in rows, stood at the mouth of the alley with her oak staff raised. Yellow ribbons knotted around the top of the staff fluttered as a slight morning breeze played with them. Her eyes were a fantastic shade of amber, probably genespliced. Her tat shifted uneasily on her left cheek, the spurred and clawed triquetra of a Billebonge-trained Shaman. She stood a little too tensely to be completely untrained for combat, her hand on the staff was steady and placed just so. I wondered why she had no sword. Shamans with combat training usually like steel.

  Tanner Family. Why would the Mob want to kill a healer and a Shaman now? After filling a Skinlin and a Necromance with holes. Is it a Mob war on psions? I shook my right hand out, my claws retracting slowly. My breath came in harsh gasps, not because of effort.

  I was gasping because I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to kill. The seduction of bloodlust whispered under conscious thought, tempting me. It would be so easy.

  They were, after all, only human.

  Stop it, Danny. You’re human too. You’re too close to the edge. This is too personal, and you’re going over the line. Calm down. The cold on my left arm retreated before the heat of bloodlust as I struggled to control myself.

  “Annette Cameron,” I husked. “I’m looking for Annette Cameron.” Please, Anubis. Give me a little help here. I don’t think I’m quite safe right now. Rage receded slowly, leaving behind a slow smoky feeling of strain.

  I’m deconstructing. This is bad. Too much stress and too little rest, my psyche was beginning to fray at the edges.

  The worst thing was, I wasn’t sure I cared.

  The sedayeen nodded. Her eyes were a little wide, I think I was too much for even a sedayeen’s calm at the moment. “That’s Cam.” She pointed at the Shaman. “I’m Mercy. Come inside.”

  “Do you know who I am?” I managed around the lump in my throat. My shoulder was still numb, but underneath the numbness a deep broad pain began to surface.

  “You’re Dante Valentine.” The yellow-haired Shaman’s hands shook only slightly, the ribbons atop her staff fluttering. “Eddie described you. He said that if anything ever happened to him, you were someone we could trust.”

  I’d forgotten what it was like to be around sedayeen. Inside the clinic—dark because the windows were boarded up and Mercy didn’t turn the lights on—the sense of peace was palpable, stroking and calming even the most jagged of auras. The smell of violets wafted through the air; one of the peculiarities of psion noses is that violet scent doesn’t shut off in our nasal receptors like in everyone else’s. We’re maybe the only humans who can smell violets for a long time.

  Call us lucky.

  The waiting room had chairs and a children’s corner. The sight of brightly-colored plasticine made my heart leap into my throat. I tasted bile and looked away, shoving my sword into the loop on my rig. I didn’t trust myself with edged metal right now. The reception desk didn’t have an AI deck, I would bet they had a psion there to get an initial read on the patients during open hours. A good idea when dealing with Chillfreaks and human refuse in a free clinic.

  A maintenance ’bot retreated as we came in, its red LED blinking. The air was dyed blue with calm, freighted with the smell of flowers and mallow. Mercy led me back through a pair of swinging doors and into a maze of examining rooms, offices, and private labs.

  The Shaman—Cameron—kept giving me nervous little sidelong glances. I didn’t blame her. I knew what my aura looked like—the trademark glitterlamp sparkles of a Necromance threaded with black diamond demon flames, the mark on my shoulder pulsing and staining through my shifting defenses and cloaks of energy. I tore through the psychic ether like the sound of a slicboard through a Ludder convention, not as loud as Japhrimel but unable to hide with little effort like some other psions could. I looked, in short, like trouble.

  It was truth in advertising. I felt like trouble now.

  “What was Eddie working on?” I asked, as Mercy touched a scanlock to the right of a smooth plasteel door. She actually flinched. Great, I even scare sedayeen. “Gabe didn’t tell me.”

  “It’s not what he was working on,” the healer replied. “It’s what he found, what he finished.” The door fwooshed aside, white full-spectrum bulbs popping into life. The light speared my eyes before they adjusted, I found myself looking into a stripped-down, empty lab. “This is where he was working.”

  This isn’t where he died. The lab he was in had different tiles on the floor.

  Then I saw the counter under growlights. Blooming under the hot radiance of the lamps, their roots safe in hydropon bubbles, were Eddie’s datura plants, blossoming and healthy. Each one of them had frilly double-trumpet flowers, purple and white. Datura, used for binding spells and painblockers, if I remembered right it used to be called crazyweed or jimsweed. Poisonous, and illegal for anyone but a registered Skinlin or sedayeen to propagate.

  “Datura,” I whispered. “What the hell did Eddie find?”

  The door whooshed closed behind us, and I turned to face the Shaman and the sedayeen. The mark on my shoulder sent a tingle down my arm, a welcome relief from numb coldness. I restrained the urge to reach under my shirt and rub the ropes of scarring that made Japhrimel’s name branded into my skin.

  “Cam? You want to tell her?”

  The Shaman shook her head, but she answered. She stank of a raw edge of fear under her spiked scent of magick, something I understood. I’d be afraid too if I was her. “I was working with Eddie. So was Mercy. We were looking for an alkaloid-based painblocker for Pico-PhizePharm.” She took a deep breath, then met my gaze squarely. She had deep dark circles under her amber eyes. “What we found was a goddamn fail-safe cure for Chill.”

  CHAPTER 20

  My jaw didn’t drop, but it was close. “There is no cure for Chill.” I sounded like the air had been punched out of me, again. I was getting to sound like that a lot lately.

  Clormen-13 was instantly addictive, it was the nastiest drug on the market. The Hegemony police were constantly fighting a losing war, not only against Chill but against the violence that flowed in its wake. Chillfreaks will do literally anything for another hit, and the way the drug lowers inhibitions and stirs psychoses is bad news. Chillfreaks are like dusters; they don’t feel pain or exhaustion. All they feel
in the last stages of Chill addiction is the need.

  Unlike hash, Chill is addictive for psions; it supposedly gives a high greater than jacking in and riding a Greater Work of magick. The only problem is, it eats away at a psion’s shields and control of Power, consuming from the inside. A psion gone Chillfreak is lethal if you aren’t careful, not only for the absolute lack of any inhibition but also because they can explode on a psionic level, the magickal equivalent of walking thermonuclear bombs.

  The large broad leaves of the plants stirred innocently. They looked healthy for having been dug up recently. Eddie was—had been— one hell of a Skinlin. “No cure,” I repeated slowly. “That’s why it’s so profit—oh. Oh.”

  That’s why it was so fucking profitable, once you got someone hooked you could take them for everything they had and all they could steal. There was no cure for Chill, the detox process killed almost as surely as addiction did. A cure for Chill would be worth a lot of money—and would cut into the Mob’s profit margin worldwide.

  My heart gave a gigantic slamming leap. “Who knew? Who?” My voice stirred the plant leaves, rattled the beakers and equipment, made the tiles groan sharply.

  “Nobody from Pico-Phize knew yet. Or at least, we didn’t think they did. Massadie—our contact—might have stolen a sample. Eddie had five.” Mercy crossed her arms over her shallow breasts. Now that we were under full-spectrum lights, I saw the shadows of sleeplessness teasing under her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. I didn’t blame her a bit. Sedayeen aren’t frightened of much—they have a sort of genetic disposition to an almost-maniacal calm, bolstered by their training. But even a healer would lose a little sleep over this kind of thing.

  And let’s not forget she was faced with a patently murderous part-demon. It was probably a wonder she wasn’t running screaming in the street.

  “He left four at the house,” I said numbly. Sekhmet sa’es. Holy fuck. A cure for fucking Chill. Mercy made a restless movement—maybe my voice disturbed her. I licked my dry lips. “Sekhmet sa’es, do you have any idea… a cure. A cure for Chill.”

  “Eddie found out that when he treated the datura alkaloids with a new technique, he got something that looked a little bit like Chill. So he ran some tests, refined it; couldn’t believe what he had and brought it to me. We… there was no shortage of volunteers. We chose three. They walked out of here free of addiction. We subjected them to every marker and psiwave test. They were clean.” Mercy took a deep breath. “Eddie… he did what he had to do. He moved out of his house and into a shitty apartment on Fiske. He came in and mainlined a packet of Clormen-13. Then we locked him in an observation room until he started to suffer withdrawal. We gave him a hypo of the datura cure.”

  “You did what?” Plasglass beakers rang softly as the words hit a shrill high. I didn’t sound very much like a whispering Necromance. The daturas rustled.

  “He wouldn’t let us say it was a cure until he’d done it himself and knew for sure. He took a hypo of the datura solution. Sixteen hours later, he was clean. All bloodlevels normal, no aura damage—clean.”

  “No aura damage?” The thought of a cure for Chill made me feel distinctly woozy. I’ve faced down Lucifer himself, why do my knees feel weak?

  Gods above, this… it could topple the Mob, it could clear the streets and free millions of addicts, stop 70 percent of inner-city crime…. Gods. Gods above and below, Eddie, you came up with a cure for Chill? You beautiful, dirty, shaggy bastard. Gods above and below have mercy on you, Eddie. You deserve a frocking state-sponsored sainthood and federal buildings named after you.

  “None.” Mercy said it slowly, and very distinctly. She had started to look a little more relaxed. “It’s a cure, Valentine. A cure that works on psions and normals, a fail-safe cure for Chill. Eddie didn’t want to tell anyone yet, but I’m almost positive Massadie found out.”

  No wonder the Mob was out for blood. A fail-safe detox for Chill would cut their profits by half if not more, Pico-Phize would be able to get Hegemony and Putchkin contracts galore as well as corner the market on other alkaloid painkillers, and other pharm companies would line up espionage agents around the block to get a sneaking peek at the technique. But if Massadie had stolen a sample, why would he be looking for me?

  My brain began to work again. There was a certain ironic delight in carrying around a vial of one of the most valuable substances on earth at this point.

  Then I remembered I’d given Japhrimel the other three.

  Well, there was no safer place around for them. And that still left one vial unaccounted-for. Not to mention Gabe and Eddie’s kid, in a safe place—for now.

  I hoped like hell the hole Gabe had found was deep enough to hide her daughter. One problem at a time, Danny. One goddamn problem at a time. “Massadie. He’s been leaving messages for me. Any idea why?”

  The healer shrugged. “He’s probably a little upset. His most profitable researcher’s dead and it’s appropriations time. We found a few alkaloids, but without our Skinlin and his notations it’s hopeless. We’ll lose funding and Jovan Massadie will slip another few steps down on the corporate ladder, losing the discovery that can pay for his retirement.” Mercy’s eyes lit with sudden hope. “Gabe said she was going to call you. Is she okay? And little Liana?”

  Notations. The paper’s notations, maybe a formula. I looked at the daturas, glowing with health. “Gabe’s dead,” I said harshly. “I don’t know where the kid is, Gabe told me she was in a safe place. Right now I’m just concerned with icing the motherfuckers that did her parents.” Not to mention keeping the Devil off my ass and eluding my Fallen. It was partly a lie, I did know where Gabe’s daughter was, but until this was over nobody would hear it from me. Liana. So that’s her name.

  “Gabriele’s dead?” The Shaman exchanged a long meaningful look with Mercy and made a sharp, controlled movement. It looked like pure frustration. Or was she reaching for a blade she wasn’t carrying? “Son of a bitch.”

  It jarred me then, a warning note. I stared at the healer, but she dropped her eyes. There was something going on here, something else.

  Then again, I was probably only getting paranoid. This was a sedayeen and a fellow Shaman, Eddie’s coworkers—and in just as much danger as Gabe had been.

  “Do you two have anywhere you can go, get undercover?” I flipped the flap of my bag open, dug around inside. Metal clinked. I felt the hard leather edge of the book Selene had given me, the stiff but wilting paper of the murder file. I needed a quiet place to sit and do some reading. “And do you have a commnet for other Chill clinics?”

  “Why?” The Shaman twirled her staff, ribbons floating on the air. Her aura, a spiked peppery glow, pulsed uneasily. Her eyebrows drew together, and she cast a meaningful look at Mercy’s bowed head, as if warning me to be gentle for the healer’s sake.

  Irritation made my cheeks hot, made my right hand clench into a fist inside my bag. I met her amber eyes squarely. Why? Because I fucking well said so, Shaman. If you’d taken the time to sweat a little more in combat practice, you might have been able to look after yourself and that healer. You might have even been able to give Eddie a little protection. I swallowed, hard, burying the words. “Because I have something I want to spread around the clinic network, Shaman. Are you going to argue with me?”

  The sedayeen stepped forward, partly to deflect me. “Let’s just calm down.” She spread her hands. “We can broadcast to the entire West Coast network from here, and they can send it worldwide. Is there something you want to send out?”

  “You better believe it. Do you have someplace safe to go?” Please don’t tell me I’m going to have to find a safe place to stash them. I can’t afford to be weighed down by a fucking healer and a Shaman too lazy to keep up on combat practice.

  The Shaman laughed. It was a bitter bark, her amber eyes hard and cool. “This was our safe place. What the hell are you?”

  I’m hedaira. That won’t mean jackshit to you, though. I doubt I know
half of what it means. Where are you, Japh? Hunting Eve? My fingers drifted across the leatherbound edge again. It felt too fine-grained to be leather, really, but it didn’t feel like plasilica or pleather either. Maybe this will help—if I can translate it. Wonder what language it’s in. Quit it, Danny. You have other chips to fry. “For right now, girls, I’m your guardian angel. I’m going to keep you alive.” I paused. “And out of the Tanner Family’s greasy little hands.”

  “Why?” Cam’s fingers flicked on her staff, her aura pulsing. If she was combat-trained, why didn’t she have sharp steel? And why in the name of Anubis was she moving so carefully as if trying to hide it? I felt the nagging sense of some loose end, some instrument out of tune that was screwing up the whole holorchestra. Shook the feeling away.

  Because you’re bloody well helpless and in over your heads, that’s why. I yanked the two sheets of paper with Eddie’s careful handwriting out of my bag. “Because it’s the honorable thing to do. Where’s your commnet?”

  “In the office. Cam, please, relax. Eddie said we could trust her.” The sedayeen sounded just like Doreen used to when she thought I was being unreasonable—quiet, soothing, her tone suddenly as soft as a pampered cat’s fur. But her voice shook, and fear tinted the edges of her shielding.

  Gods, what a vote of nonconfidence.

  Her soothing voice didn’t soothe me. I wanted to hear someone else, a dry ironic male tone just slightly inclined toward sarcasm. It shook me to realize that the only person I felt like talking to right now was Japhrimel. I wanted to hear what he’d have to say about Eddie’s jacking himself on Chill to test this cure. I wanted to lean my head on his shoulder and feel his aura wrapping around mine, that damnable sense of safety. I wanted the look that sometimes passed between us, his eyes meeting mine and the feeling of being understood, of silent agreement.

  Most of all I wanted him to calm me down, because I wasn’t sure I could do it myself. I was walking around with a skin full of rage and vengeance, getting twitchy and deconstructing under the pressure.