Dante Valentine

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Oh, Gabe. Gabriele. I should have told you. I should have known.

  I’d have taken the Lourdes case anyway. Some circles had to be closed; some debts had to be paid, willing or not. I had been chosen to close the murderous circle of Rigger Hall, whether by the gods or the ghosts of murdered and mind-battered children or by Fate itself. It had been my duty.

  More than that, though, I would have done it because she’d needed me; she was my friend. My family. My kin, though we shared no blood. It had never occurred to me before that she could blame herself. That there was anything to blame her for.

  Oh, Gabriele. I’m so sorry.

  I paced down the hall and stopped, my nostrils flaring. Spice and heat filled my nose. The cuff squeezed, running with cold green light. I felt the bones in my wrist grind together.

  Not another hellhound, please. Please, Anubis, not another hellhound.

  Something didn’t smell right. There was no sound other than the soft slap of rain and the rolling iron balls of thunder. I took the last step, around the bend in the hallway, and saw the room was empty. No Lucas, no Leander, and no Asa Tanner. The drapes moved near the window, wet wind pouring in through the broken window. I hadn’t heard the glass shattering. My nostrils flared. The reek of demon was thick and overwhelming.

  I heard faint sounds, as if there was a fight outside. Clashing steel, and the roar of a werecain in a rage, and Lucas rasping a crescendo of obscenities.

  What the hell— My hand closed around the swordhilt, too late.

  The skinny, red-skinned demon slapped my blade aside and backhanded me, the force of the blow like worlds colliding. His eyes glowed yellow, cat-slit, and he exhaled foulness in my face as darker lines of red like tribal tattoos writhed over his skin. The thin, high, chilling giggle raised the hairs on my nape. It was oddly familiar, had I heard that voice before?

  Then he was on me, knee in my back, and something that burned clapped around my wrists. A noxious cloth pressed against my face, a whispered word in my ear, and darkness took me struggling down into a whirlpool. The last thing I saw was the edge of the drapes, slapping wetly at the wall below the window, and the green glow painting the walls as the wristcuff flared with icy vicious light before guttering out.

  CHAPTER 26

  I remember only flashes. A face over mine, a face I’d seen in DMZ Sarajevo while a nightclub full of Nichtvren and other paranormals danced to the throbbing beat below and a hellhound dozed at his side. Round and heavy, square teeth that still looked sharp, cat-slit glowing eyes. The face wasn’t human, for all that a human Magi’s hand had once drawn it in a charcoal sketch. The eyes were too big, the teeth too square, and the expression was… inhuman.

  Velokel? The Hunter. Allied to Eve. Anubis, help me.

  “She was not to be harmed.” A harsh unlovely voice, but with its own compelling undertone. A voice that demanded obedience, burrowed along the nerve endings and hurt as it yanked at my bones, ran hot lead into my marrow. I moaned softly, half-swallowed the sound. I could barely even think, the disorientation was so intense.

  “She’ll live.” Someone else, clear and chill as a bell. I recognized it, didn’t I? I’d heard it taunting Japhrimel, when my fingers were glued to the ropy scar of his name against my shoulder.

  “Here is your payment.” Clink of something light and metallic, a short chuffing inhale of breath. “Consider our alliance renewed.”

  Darkness took me again as I strained to open my eyes, to see, to fight.

  The next flash—a candleflame. Red flame, crimson as blood. Standing up straight, then wavering in a nonphysical direction, not guttering but seeming to shudder anyway. I struck out with fists and feet, dimly aware I was in danger. I heard shouts, and someone caught my wrist, a touch that sent fire through me and made my left shoulder crunch with vivid pain.

  “Be still,” he said, the voice that demanded I obey. I struggled against it, against him, felt the python squeeze of another mind close around mine, Power crushing down until my strangled scream choked the air. He squeezed, almost as I would with a werecain, but harder, determined—this was no warning, this was a prelude to brutal mental rape.

  No. The core of stubbornness in me rose, something hard and ugly as biting on magtape. It was the strengthless endurance that had kept me alive and conscious during some of the worst parts of my life.

  What you cannot escape you must fight. What you cannot fight, you must endure.

  Scars in the fabric of my mind tore open, bled afresh. Tearing, ripping, my defenses resisted, denying him entrance to my mind, to the innermost core of me. For a dizzying eternity I was back in the shattered cafeteria in Rigger Hall, choking on ectoplasm as a Feeder ripped and stabbed through my psyche—

  —shoving against the back of my throat, against my nose and eyes and ears, fingering at the zipper of my jeans, another tide of slime as Mirovitch’s ka tried to force its way in—

  A breathless scream spiraled up out of me. No. I would fight, I would die before enduring another vicious mental assault. I could not be violated that way again and remain sane.

  “Stop.” Female, young, and edged with steel, a smell like baking bread and heavy musk, a smell I recognized. The smell of Androgyne.

  Eve, Doreen’s daughter. Lucifer’s child. And maybe mine too.

  “Stop it. Didn’t I tell you not to hurt her?” The sharp guncrack of a slap, and I fell into darkness again, the mental pressure falling away and my slight helpless moaning spiraling into silence.

  Next came the gutwrench of hover transport, my stomach turning over in purely psychosomatic reaction to the rattling hum of antigrav. My cheek against freezing-cold metal, the Gauntlet on my left wrist propping my head up. I moaned, soundlessly, my mouth hung slack. Something was very wrong. I felt too weak, too fevered. What was happening to me?

  Burning fingers stroked my forehead. “Hush,” Eve said, gently. “It’s all right, Dante. I’m here now.”

  I don’t want you, I thought hazily. I want Japhrimel. It should be him saying those words to me. Where is he? Japh?

  Power jolted down my spine, spread through nerve channels still screaming-raw with pain, detonated agony in my belly and my side, as if all the old wounds, from Lucifer’s kick to the hellhound tearing into me, were slashing back open. I screamed, more and more Power forced into me, with no regard for pain or humanity.

  “There,” she whispered, stroking my forehead again. “Better?”

  It wasn’t better. Japhrimel wouldn’t have hurt me like that, he had never hurt me like that. Childish faith rose up in me, I was too exhausted to fight it. Darkness, since I couldn’t open my eyes, the crackling breathlessness of a small space full of demons, a heavy spice in the air that closed around me and soothed even as my nervous system jolted with more electric pain, raw acid tracing through my bones.

  “Japhrimel,” I heard myself whisper, cracked lips shaping the word.

  “Soon enough,” she said, and I heard cloth moving. She walked away, but the aura of her scent lingered, sinking into my head, confusing me until I passed out again.

  When I woke next, my fingers slid against my breastbone. I lay on my back, on something soft. I felt the arc of my collarbone, the calluses on my fingertips scraping as I reached instinctively for my left shoulder. Then, contact, Japhrimel’s mark writhing and hot, bumps and ropes of scarring moving under my skin like the inked lines of my tat.

  I don’t care, I thought hazily. I need you. Please.

  The vision swallowed me whole, I sank into seeing out through his eyes as if I had never stopped. Had I always resisted before?

  —spine straight, sitting in the middle of the circle holding square holding pentacle, the diagram spinning lazily against the glassy floor. Wrists braceleted with ignored agony, shoulders afire, staring straight ahead with dry burning eyes. The candleflame was low and guttering, now and then stretching. A few more hours, and he would be free.

  The door opened, slowly, and she had come. As he had suspe
cted, she could not ignore the chance to taunt him. Tall demon, the mark of the Androgyne on her forehead, a sleek cap of pale hair and a half-smile that tore at him, reminding. She was not the woman he wanted to see.

  She wore simple blue, the marriage-color, a sweater and loose breeches hiding none of her slender grace. The aura of an Androgyne—spice, the potent smell of possible breeding, the attraction of fertility—teased at him.

  It was not the scent he wanted.

  “A spider emerges.” Forcing the words out between his teeth, no politeness, no petty games of silence. “The trap was baited well.”

  She shrugged, pushing her sweater-sleeves up. “Sometimes the clumsiest tools are the most effective. You could be free in a single moment, Eldest. All that is necessary is to say the word.” Her voice stroked the air, the weapon of an Androgyne, meant to seduce, cajole, entice.

  His right hand became a fist, and the flexing of muscle pushed at his wrist, a red tide of pain sweeping up his arm.

  She laughed, a low sarcastic bark of merriment. Perhaps he truly did amuse her. “Then I will be forced to treat with your companion, Fallen. She, at least, will listen to reason.”

  Both wrists burned now as his fists knotted. The candle guttered, recovered itself slowly. “If she is harmed—”

  “Why would I harm her? She is so amenable, so willing to please.”

  It was his turn to laugh, sweeping his eyes across the room at the windows. No sunlight. Another day gone while he worried at the walls of his prison, tearing apart the demonic magick that held him bit by bit, thread by thread. Inhuman patience, a single-pointed will, spurred by the need burning in his veins. Need, like addiction. He wanted to see her again, he needed to see her again, to reassure himself she was alive, unharmed.

  He needed to touch her.

  “You have not found her so?” Eve continued, patent surprise in her tone. “But of course not. And now all her frustrated passion for you will fall upon me. I am, at least, willing to simply ask her. She does not trust you.”

  “She will know better in time.” The words scraped his throat raw, he forced down rage. It would blind him, and he needed clear vision now.

  “She escaped and killed a hellhound, Eldest. Even now she cries out your name as she lies wounded—no, not by my hand, I assure you. Such a thing has never been seen before, a Fallen’s concubine overmatching a Hound.”

  He shrugged, the movement spilling pain into his shoulders. The heavy liquid of his armored wings slid against his skin. “You do not deceive me.”

  It was not an answer.

  Her tone was gentle. Of course, she did not need to shout. “You are Fallen, yet with a demon’s Power. She is hedaira, bound to you and sharing in your newfound status. Such a pair could help me topple him, Eldest. Such a pair could name their price for support or service.”

  He closed his eyes. “You bore me.”

  “What side will you choose if she ties herself to me? Answer me that, Deathbringer. Should I add any of your other titles, Right Hand? Kinslayer?”

  He said nothing.

  “She had this,” the Androgyne continued, and he opened his eyes again. Saw, with no real surprise, the book. How had she found it? How had she had time to find it? Or was it another lie? “I think perhaps I should read it to her, I may even teach her the language it is written in. It will make a wonderful bedtime story.”

  His legs twitched, ready to bring him to his feet. But it was still not yet time. He closed his eyes again, did his best to close his ears.

  The silvery laugh taunted him. “Pleasant thoughts, Eldest.” The door scraped along the floor as she closed it, and the sound-not-sound of another hellhound appearing, its padded obsidian feet striking against the floor like fingers caressing a drumhead, scored his ears. His—

  —fingertips fell away from the mark, and I blinked up at a ceiling made of blue. Deep dark blue velvet hung in waves, stitched with tiny little things that glittered in the low clear light pouring in through a gray, rain-speckled window.

  The bed was fit for a princess, four-postered and choked in dark blue silk and velvet. I pushed myself up on my elbows, flinched as my tender head reminded me someone had been messing with my psychic shields. Silk sheets slid cold against my naked skin. There was a nivron fireplace spitting blue flame, and the decor ran to heavy faux-Renascence. A slice of white tiled bathroom gleamed through an open door. Two chairs, both of blue watered silk, and something incongruous—a steam-driven radiator, painted white, set under the window.

  I thought there weren’t any of those left. If I hadn’t been so research-oriented, I might not have recognized it. As it was, I’d swallowed history books whole all my life. A printed page was a psion’s best friend—books didn’t point, or mock, or beat, or manipulate. They simply told the story.

  My eyes closed, slowly, as if my eyelids were falling curtains. The moments seen through Japhrimel’s eyes had taken on the quality of a dream, fuzzy and fading. I sighed.

  What dream is this, before my eyes? I heard Lewis’s voice, even and deep. Dreams, the children of an idle brain… I dreamed a dream, and lo my dream was taken from me….

  My head echoed with jabs of pain, poking into my temples. My mental shields had held up, demon-strong—but old scars had ripped apart again, as if my psyche was part of my flesh and torn open. A nervous trembling like voltage through a faulty AI relay quaked up from my bones. I shivered, cold and feverish at the same time.

  After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well, Lewis’s ghost whispered. I could almost smell the coffee he used to drink, thick espresso cut with cream. Could feel my child-self’s cheek resting on my small hand as I listened to his flexible voice slide through the ancient words, strangely accented. Lord, what fools these mortals be. Night and day the gates of dark Death stand open….

  Another voice cut across the recitation. I will always come for you.

  Japhrimel. My eyes flew open. My sword lay sheathed next to me. My right hand curled loose around the hilt. My bag, a dimple of darkness, lay against the bottom of the bed. I heard stealthy creaks, little tiny sounds, telling me others moved in this place. But the sounds were… different. Too light and quick, or too groaningly heavy. They were not the human sounds of an inhabited house. The air was thick and heavy with crackling Power, the walls vibrating with demon shielding. I recognized it as the type of shields Japhrimel had laid in every room we’d shared. Shielding to keep a room invisible, to keep everything inside safe.

  My bedroom in Toscano had been blue, too. But the light in that bedroom had been warm, southern sun flooding every surface. This light was cold, gray, and wet. Saint City light.

  I reached for my bag, making a small noise as my abdomen protested. The sight of the Gauntlet, no longer dull silver but turned dark as if corroded, barely stopped me. I couldn’t tell if the cold clasping my flesh was from the cuff or not.

  I didn’t care, either.

  I dragged my bag across velvet, flipped it open, and found it unransacked. Even Selene’s book was still there. It was small, the size of a holovid still romance, and in the light I saw the cover, too fine-grained to be leather.

  Had I really seen the book in Eve’s hands, through Japhrimel’s eyes? Had Eve slipped it back into my bag? Or was Japhrimel even able to lie to me while I looked through his eyes, since he was no longer a familiar but Fallen?

  I wouldn’t put it past him. But there would be no way for him to know when I was going to touch the mark. Eve wants my help, she wants his help too; If she can’t have both of us she’ll take me. I don’t blame her at all. I didn’t even mind her telling him about my “frustrated passion” for him.

  Hey, you can’t argue with the truth.

  My fingers trembled, the chipped black polish on my nails glowing mellow. My cuff ran and rang with green light, the fluid lines carved in it twisting and straining. Sheets and blankets pooled in my lap, my golden skin unmarked but feeling stretched-thin, too strained.

  Hedaraie Occasu
s Demonae, stamped into the cover with gilt. It looked old, and the faint spice of demons clung to every closely-written page. It was written in a spidery alien hand, the ink deep maroon on vellum pages. It was in a language I had no hope of reading, vaguely Erabic but with plenty of spiked diacritical marks I couldn’t decipher. Useless unless I did some more research, found someone who knew what language it was and had time to teach me or translate it. I glanced at a few pages without truly seeing them, examined the binding, and dropped it in my bag as if it had burned me.

  It was skin, but not animal skin. Bile whipped the back of my throat. I yanked my bag closed and tightened my grip on my sword.

  I sensed her before the door opened, the black diamond fire of a demon’s aura. When the door opened—I heard no click of a lock—and Eve stepped in, I sucked in my breath and pulled the sheet up with my right hand, covering my chest and wadding the silk against the mark on my shoulder. My left hand closed around my sword so tightly the knuckles turned white.

  She was slim, with sleek pale hair and flashing dark-blue eyes. Today she wore white, a pristine crisp button-down shirt with the tapered sleeves that were fashionable now, a pair of bleached jeans, good boots. Doreen had always worn sandals.

  Doreen. The cuff squeezed my wrist again, so hard the bones creaked.

  She looked like Doreen, the same triangular face and wide eyes, the same way of tilting her head. She folded her arms, a fall of material caught in them, and I breathed in the smell of Androgyne, the Power flooding from her sparking along my nerve endings.