Dante Valentine

by Lilith Saintcrow

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  The stupid man. As if I hadn’t been trying to do just that for so long now. “He won’t answer me. Or he lies. Look, McKinley, I’m sorry I fucking well asked you. Just shut up.”

  Mercifully, he did. I rested my forehead on the glass and bumped Fudoshin’s hilt on the window. Once. Twice. Three times. For luck. Eve had even come up with a scabbard, a lovely black-lacquered curve of reinforced wood. “I don’t like this,” I muttered. “Don’t like it at all.”

  McKinley held his peace. I swung away from the window, my rig creaking, and cast a sharp glance over the room. Bed fit for a princess, choked in blue velvet. Fainting-couches in the same blue velvet, lyrate tables holding knickknacks humming with sleepy demon magick. The pale cream carpet was thick enough to lose credit discs in. Electric light grew paler, compensating for day rising in the east.

  Fine hairs on my nape rose. Premonition ruffled past me, icy fingernails touching my cheeks. Whatever was going to happen was coming soon, rolling toward me like ball bearings on a reactive-greased slope.

  The black hole inside my brain shivered. The same sounds chuckling up from its depths were coming through the walls—the muffled evidence of things not human walking around, making themselves at home, doing whatever it was demons did.

  Keep moving, Danny. If you stop you’ll drown.

  That was rabbit-talk. Right now I was safest with my head down, staying in a protected location. The more I moved around, the more people would see me, the more chance someone would get word of where I was.

  I had just acted on my own, for once since this whole thing started not just being pushed from place to place. I was pretty sure nobody would have expected this from me. The thing to do now was wait for the countermove, just like in battlechess.

  I let out another long, soft breath. My stomach twisted unhappily. Finally, I peeled myself away from the window. “You hungry?”

  McKinley had picked another wall to lean against, where he could see both me and the door. He glanced up, the bruised circles under his eyes harshly evident in the new light. “I could eat,” he said, as if it had just occurred to him.

  “There’s bound to be a kitchen in this pile. We’ll find something.”

  If I can’t move around out in the city I’ll settle for poking around here. If I have to stay in one room for very long I’m going to go insane.

  I wished I was exaggerating.

  We didn’t have to go very far—at the end of the short curving hall outside the suite’s door, there was the hoverlift we’d come up in and a small kitchen, stocked with the usual Paradisse hotelier fare—cheese, bread, fruit, coffee, a wide array of gourmet freeze-reheat stuff like individual pizzas and packets of beef pho with noodles like brain wrinkles pressing against plaswrap. Human food, which made me wonder about this place. I knew demons could eat—sometimes Japh ate with me, for example, and seemed to enjoy it—but I wasn’t entirely sure if they had to. Was this just Eve planning for me, or did it come with the tower? Who was paying for all this?

  Then again, demons have no problem with money.

  McKinley settled down with a hunk of yellow cheese and a baguette, taking bites off an apple in between. I popped one of the individual pizzas into the microwave and hit the button. Everything was new, top of the line, and unused.

  This is weird. Then again, sunshine, weird is your middle name these days. “Why would she have human food?”

  “They like it. It’s not nourishment to them, it’s an accessory.” McKinley cracked a bottle of mineral water open with a practiced twist of his wrist. “Plus, any demon is going to have human retainers. It’s how it works. They like to stay behind the scenes unless there’s killing to be done.”

  Just a fount of useful information, aren’t you? When you’re not sneering at me, that is. “Oh.” I watched through the plasglass door as the pizza heated, cheese melting and bubbling, the smell of marinara and cheese, not to mention crust, suddenly filling my mouth with water. “Retainers. This is so very feudal.”

  “Guess so. Like the Mob, only not so nice.” He was perking up, eating in great starving bites, barely stopping to chew. His eyes never stopped roving the room, and he’d picked the seat between me and the door.

  Exactly where I’d sit, if I was doing bodyguard duty on someone.

  My nape prickled again. The microwave dinged, and I retrieved my little pizza. I settled myself in the safest spot, my back to the blind corner holding a mini-fridge and the disposal unit. McKinley shifted a little in his seat, his metallic left hand lying discarded on the blondwood tabletop.

  “How did you end up working for Japh?” I didn’t think he’d tell me, but it was a way to pass the time. I waited for the pizza to cool down, eyeing the gobbets of melted cheese. It smelled like real cheese too, and I was suddenly reminded of the first meal I’d ever eaten with my Fallen.

  My, how the world turns.

  “I was almost dead but I’d put up a hell of a fight. He was impressed, and offered me either a quick passing or service.” McKinley shrugged. “I wasn’t ready to die yet.”

  I peeled a precut slice out of the golden wheel. Blew across the piece to cool it. “You know, you could give a demon lessons in not really answering the goddamn question.”

  “My former lord wanted to kill the Eldest. We tried like hell, but we were only human, even with… modifications.” He lifted his left hand slightly, laid it back to rest on the tabletop.

  I held the pizza, my mouth hanging open, for what seemed an eternity. Then I took a bite. Huh. “We meaning you and Vann?”

  “And a few others.” His face changed, and he laid down the hunk of cheese. “They should be looking for you too. That’s another reason why I’m worried.”

  “Looking for me?”

  “Just like guardian angels, Valentine.” He took a long pull of mineral water, washing some taste out of his mouth. “We had a perimeter set up in Toscano, keeping you under wraps.”

  I was getting tired of my mouth hanging open in astonishment, so I took another bite. Hot tomato sauce, melted cheese, a little heavy on the oregano. The food helped, made me feel more solid. “I never knew.”

  “That was the idea,” he replied in a stunningly good you are an idiot tone.

  I’d suspected something, of course. But I’d never had a whisper of anyone watching Japhrimel and me while I did my best to settle into a boring regular life, shopping for shadowjournals and antique furnishings, going for walks in the afternoon sun… and waking up screaming with Mirovitch’s ka whispering inside my head, ripping and tearing as fingers of burning ectoplasm tried to claw down my throat and rape my mind.

  I shivered, dropped my pizza back down to its nest of plaswrap. The black hole in my head widened, echoes spilling through my skull.

  The scar in the hollow of my left shoulder twinged, warningly.

  “You okay?” McKinley eyed me.

  My shoulder twinged again, like a fishhook in flesh, plucking as it twitched. “Fine.” I scooped up the pizza again and began wolfing without tasting it. I’d need fuel, no matter what happened next. “You know,” I said between bites, wiping tomato sauce away from my lips, “I don’t think I should stay up here like a princess in a pea, or whatever. I think we should wander around this place and peek at what the demons are doing.”

  McKinley choked on a bite of baguette. His black eyes got very wide. “Why not just get the hell out of here?”

  I settled down to the rest of my pizza. “Because without Japhrimel, you and I are both dead out there. This isn’t just a papercut to Lucifer. I threw down a challenge big-time. I’m sure the Hegemony would love to get their hands on me too. I’m too hot to handle now—but I don’t trust demons either, even if they have good reasons to protect me. I’m getting to where I don’t trust anyone, not even myself. So I want to look around where I’ve landed.” Besides, I can’t take being cooped up in this tower.

  I felt horribly naked, even with all the demo
n shielding on the walls. I also felt filthy, messy, ugly, and the slightest bit shaky. I itched for some kind of action—sparring, or a hard clean fight. Something to get rid of the bright red ribbon of rage under the surface of my thoughts, growing in increments, pressing against the confines of my temper.

  A shadow fell over the kitchen door, and I knew who it was even before she appeared. I smelled her, a smell that was quickly growing unique, impressing itself on my sensitive nose.

  McKinley’s chair scraped as he bolted to his feet, the color draining from his cheeks and turning him whey-pale as the scorch of a demon filled the air. I finished the last two bites of crust, and Eve folded her arms, smiling that imperturbable smile. Her clotted-ice hair touched her shoulders, almost writhing with life, and her gasflame eyes passed over me in a long arc.

  “I see you found your provisions. I thought it best not to ask you to dinner with our other guests.”

  I licked my fingers. “Charmed. I could probably eat my way through here in an hour or so. But I was thinking of looking around, seeing what your setup is here.”

  A slim shoulder lifted, dropped. She wore blue, again, an indigo cable-knit sweater and slacks that had to be designer, the same pair of low Verano heels. Nothing but the best for this demon.

  I found myself searching her face again for any echo of Doreen, comparing her to what she had looked like, the glamour that had fooled me into… what? Going up against the Devil? I’d’ve done it anyway. It wasn’t like Lucifer was going to leave me alone.

  “If there is time,” she finally answered.

  I deliberately didn’t reach for Fudoshin’s hilt. The Knife hummed against my hip. “What’s going on? Where’s Kgembe?” The scar twined again, and began to tingle—not the numb prickle of Japhrimel elsewhere, but a waking-up feeling.

  I hoped it was what I thought it was.

  “The Magi has disappeared—wise of him, I think. We have planned a council of war, and I thought to request your presence. Several of my allies have found themselves recently freed from Hell.” A slight tilt of her head, like a servomotor on jeweled bearings, a graceful oiled inhuman movement.

  “Fancy that. War, huh?” Well, what else would you call this, Danny? “When?”

  “Tonight. At dusk. It’s traditional. May I count on your presence?”

  I nodded, my hair moving uneasily on my scalp. I was suddenly aware of how I must look—dirty, bled on and air-dried, and probably just two short steps away from crazed. “You can.”

  “Very well.” She turned on her heel, sharply, without even deigning to look in McKinley’s direction.

  “Eve.” If that’s even your name.

  She halted, her narrow back to me.

  “You can put that face back on. If you want. The one that looks like Doreen.” I might even find it easier.

  She paused for just the barest of seconds. “Why? This is what I am, Dante.”

  I might find it a little easier to look at you. Or then again, I might not. “You were human. At least partly.” Not just human. She’d been a little girl.

  A child I had been unable to save.

  “Nothing of humanity survives Hell’s fires.” No shrug, just a simple statement of fact. Fresh dawning light ran along the snakes of her hair, touched the supple curve of her hip under the sweater’s hem, and cringed away from something that didn’t belong in this world.

  I let her kiss my cheek, once. I got so close to her I could smell her, feel her heat. The thought sent a shiver through me. Had it just been that she looked like Doreen? Was there any truth to her claim that I was part of the genetic mix used to make her?

  How else had she found me? “What about what you got from me? Doesn’t that count?”

  “It matters as little or as much as you want to make it matter. You’re still the only mother I have.”

  McKinley made a restless movement. Maybe he wanted to argue.

  “I can’t hold a gun to your head and make you human.” I can’t even do that to myself.

  “If you could, would you?” She still didn’t turn around, and her tone was excessively gentle.

  “No.” It came out immediately, without thought. “I wouldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  Because that’s not the way I play, goddammit. “Just because. It wouldn’t change anything.”

  She turned back, slowly, letting the light play over each feature, each hill and valley geometrically just a little off, altered. “I cannot afford to be too human. Not with him to slay, and all of us to save—and your lover, ally or not, to reckon with.” As usual, her face twisted slightly when she referred to Lucifer, her lip lifting and nose wrinkling. I watched, fascinated. It was a curiously immature movement, like a teen sucking on bitter algae candy.

  My right hand fell limp at my side, no longer aching for the feel of a hilt and a blade cutting flesh. The ribbon of rage shrank, just a little bit.

  “But as human as I can be, I will be in your honor, my mother.” A slight little bow, her icy hair falling forward over slim shoulders, and then she was gone, the sunlight falling through where she’d stood as the sound of her footsteps—too light and quick to be human, and faintly wrong in the gait as well—retreated down the hall.

  The scar began to burn, faintly at first, heat working through its numbness. A candleflame moving closer and closer to the flesh, a spot of warmth.

  I found my right hand hovering over my dirty shoulder, fingertips aching for the feel of the ropy scar twisting and bumping under my touch.

  “Valentine—” McKinley began.

  “Shut up.” I sounded strained and unnatural even to myself. “Just eat. I’m going to get cleaned up.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Dying sunlight turned bloody in the west, and the room was long and wide, windowless, and full of movement that stopped the moment I stepped over the threshold. Plain white walls vibrated with demon warding, and the long, slim, highly polished table running down the center was full of demons.

  I froze.

  At the head of the table Eve straightened, pushing back her pale ropes of hair. The plunging inside my stomach turned into a full-fledged barrel roll with dynos straining.

  The room full of demons turned still and trembling as a pool of quicksilver on a level surface, twitching with Power as each of them turned their lambent eyes on me.

  Tall or short, most slender and golden-skinned, but each with that aura of difference demons carry. They are not beautiful or ugly, though some of them are bizarre in the extreme. It’s that breath of alienness that makes the human mind shiver when looking at them.

  They were all of the Greater Flight. There was no mistaking it. To my left, dozing in a corner, two hellhounds slumped together, sleeping, their obsidian limbs splayed in a caricature of relaxation. From under one eyelid, a sliver of orange peeked—not sleeping, then.

  A prickling shiver ran through my entire body, and I was suddenly very sure that I wanted to see Japhrimel again.

  Right fucking now.

  “Dante.” Eve’s voice stroked each exposed edge, from the table to the ceiling, and a breath of baking bread and fresh musk reached me. The smell of an Androgyne.

  Like Lucifer.

  My stomach heaved, the black hole in my head pulsing and straining until I could push it down, lock it away. I swallowed with difficulty and met her eyes again.

  I found myself relieved she hadn’t taken on Doreen’s face again after all. There was no denying the demon in her. Even the way she held herself, completely still, as if liquid grace had frozen itself at one particular point in a dance.

  “Gentlemen,” she continued, “I present to you Dante Valentine, the Eldest’s hedaira, and the Key to the throne of Hell.”

  I wondered if I should take a bow.

  “What nonsense are you speaking?” This voice, from a demon with dappled, mottled skin like the side of a painted pony, was a knife against the skin after the soft restfulness of Eve’s. “This is the Eldest’s whore, and our ho
stage.”

  A ripple ran through the assembled demons. One at my end of the table, a tall sharp-faced male with a shock of black thistledown hair, tensed as if to rise to his feet. He wore white, rags fluttering as his fingers curled around the edge of the table, and my awareness centered on him, my hand itching for the swordhilt again.

  When Eve spoke I almost twitched.

  “Zaj.” The single word was loaded with gunpowder threading through the softness of her tone. The shortening of a demon’s name sounded like a weapon in her mouth. “Our plan requires the Key. Without the Key, we could not retrieve the Knife. Without the Knife, there is no challenge we can make to Lucifer that will not end in our death or capture. With Dante’s help, we can rob Lucifer of the greatest support of his regime—the Eldest’s loyalty. And with the Knife, there is hope for us to topple Lucifer, or simply reach a treaty with him that he dares not break.”

  “You are a fool. No demon can wield the Knife.” The mottled demon’s chair grated along parquet as he rose slowly to his feet, his bright blue burning eyes fixed on me. My skin chilled, my throat going dry, and I was vaguely aware of McKinley moving closer to me, his peculiar null aura contracting.

  “She is not demon. What does the riddle say? The hand that can hold the Knife has faced fire and not been consumed, has walked in death and returned, a hand given strength beyond its ken. So spoke Ilvarimel’s hedaira, in the Temple of the White-Walled City, before she died at the hands of the Kinslayer.” Eve turned away from the table, passing the high-backed chair, pacing to the wall and staring at its smooth white gleam. The warding sunk into the walls trembled under her attention, my knees echoing that tremor.

  Well, that’s bad poetry. Why didn’t anyone ever tell me about this before?

  “Who fits this description, Zaj?” Eve’s voice was soft. “Who has escaped fire, walked in Death, and been given strength beyond a mortal’s ken by the first Fallen in millennia? If you have another candidate who fits the bill, feel free to produce them for our study and illumination.”