Dante Valentine

by Lilith Saintcrow

  The world turned sideways. The medallion flared with a thundercrack of sound, demon protections laid in the room shattering. It tore through the careful layers of warding like the whine of hoverfreight thrums in the bones, a deep undeniable sound.

  I made it to hands and knees and launched myself, rolling. Fudoshin’s hilt socked into my hand as I struggled up. The blade sliced air, a small sound lost in the swelling chaos.

  Eve rose like a wave from the wreck of the iron chair, spun on her toes, and bolted for the stairs. I whirled and sprinted after her, hysterical strength filling unruly limbs suddenly weighted with scrap plasteel. I heard McKinley yell something else short and sharp behind me.

  Sorry, sunshine, but you work for the demon that just threw a wrench in the works. My priority now was getting Eve out of the fire zone. The past had looped over and touched the present again—Doreen in front of me, pale hair swinging as she ran; my heart in my mouth, tasting of copper and bile—and the sound behind us of demons, and a hell of a fight breaking out. My katana blurred down in a half-circle, ending up with the blade tucked behind my arm; it would do no good to spit myself on my own sword if I fell.

  It felt goddamn good to have the hilt in my hand again, to have a fight in front of me, everything becoming clear and sharp as only the last desperate battles are. It felt so stupidly good my breath caught on a half-sob I couldn’t afford, I needed all my lung-strength for running.

  The stairs spiraled up, and Eve outdistanced me. I lagged under the weight of effort, my breath coming harsh and tearing, and saw the door just as she neatly nipped through it.

  Roof access. Good plan. Hope she has a hover stashed, or this could get real ugly. McKinley’s footsteps pounded on the stairs behind me—at least, I hoped it was McKinley.

  I was fairly sure I could outrun him.

  I tumbled out of the door into the moaning wind of a high-altitude platform. I almost ran into Eve, whose golden hand shot out and caught my upper arm, digging in with fingers like steel claws. The sudden stop almost tore my arm out of my socket and my stomach from its moorings, and I was suddenly very sorry I’d eaten.

  The landing-platform spread out like the petal of a flower, glowing a pale amber to match the rest of the tower. My hair lifted on a wave of sweet synth-perfume. I caught my balance just as McKinley plowed through the door behind us, and I brought my sword around in an easy semicircle, blade cutting air with a low whispering sound into the ready position. My scabbard was in my left hand, and I turned my wrist to brace it, using it as a shield and potential weapon. My sleeves flapped, pulled by the freshening breeze.

  “Eve.” My voice cut through the whine of the wind. “You go. I’ll take care of this.”

  Because there on the platform, with a laserifle and two plasguns pointed at us, were Vann and Lucas Villalobos. Of course they hadn’t come to meet up with me. They were on Japhrimel’s side.

  CHAPTER 32

  Eve’s fingers fell from my upper arm as I moved forward, blocking their firing angle. Vann was on one knee, laserifle against his shoulder and his other weapons glinting. A bruise spread up his neck, mottling the left side of his face, dried blood clinging in his hair.

  Lucas stood, disheveled and threadbare and dangerous, his yellow eyes focused past me on Eve. His guns glittered too—SW Remington 60-watt plasguns. Not even a demon can outrun that.

  Lucas, on the job and working overtime. Only he’d forgotten he was working for me.

  Which made him an enemy.

  Great. It’s me against the world now. Why am I not surprised? I felt almost like myself again, with the unholy urge to laugh rising under my breastbone.

  “Eve. I mean it. Go.” I took another step forward, and Vann twitched.

  “Give it up, Valentine.” The wind flirted with his hair, his eyes were narrowed and professional, cool and distant in the bruised mask of his face. “Don’t make us hurt someone.”

  He sounded like it would be so easy. And Lucas’s finger tightened on the trigger, his entire body tensing. There could be no question about it. He’d betrayed me too.

  I. Have. Had. Enough.

  My temper snapped behind my breastbone, and welcome wine-dark rage flooded me. It scorched through tender burned channels where psychic scars still smoked, courtesy of whatever Lucifer had done to me and the strain I’d put on myself since then. A roar filled my throat, flame springing up from a deep burning well of rage. I dropped my scabbard, both hands closing around the hilt and bringing the swordblade high.

  Fucked with me for the last time, it whispered in the sudden silence of utter berserk rage. Kill them. Kill them all.

  I flung myself across the intervening space, a sound I barely recognized bursting from my throat. It was a cat’s scream, fury and terror rolled into a pretty package wrapped with barbed wire and ignited with nuclear force. Eve ran for the edge of the bare empty platform as I brought the sword down, blue-white flame streaking along the arc of the strike, light stuttering because I was moving with berserker speed, the crackle and hiss of flame filling my ears.

  Time slowed down. The streak of red down low was Vann, firing at Eve. I crashed into him first, the katana making a high shivering note as I followed through with the strike, a perfect downsweep. The laserifle split asunder, a burst of plas splashing out and underlighting the scene with bloody glow. I pivoted on my front foot, hearing faintly my sensei’s habitual admonition from the soup of memory inside my imploding head.

  Move, no think! Fight, no think!

  My knee met Vann’s face with the sound of a melon dropped on a hot sidewalk. He flew back like a rag doll, and my leg paused, cocked now for the strike back, which pitched the top half of my body forward under Lucas’s fire. He was shooting over my head, aiming at Eve.

  At my daughter, at the only piece left of my dead demon-murdered lover. Human or not, she was mine.

  She was all I had left.

  I snapped my leg back, my heel hitting something soft and crunching. It snapped like a flag in a high breeze. Another pivot, heel sliding out, and my katana blurred as my wrist turned, everything gaining momentum by the spin, and I struck not to injure but to kill.

  If Lucas hadn’t flown backward from the kick, I would have cut him in half. As it was I completed the movement, stamping down with what was now my lead foot, the blade kissing only air.

  The building swayed like a plucked harpstring, and I heard the whine of a hover engine, close. Very close.

  “Valentine!” McKinley screamed, his voice breaking. “Stop it!”

  Oh, no. I am not nearly finished here. They’re still breathing—and so are you. A hover rose up to the landing pad, sleek and black, and I saw a hatch in its side dilating as a pilot or AI held it steady. I also saw Lucas dragging himself up to his feet, blood painting his face into a mask of yellow-eyed rage as Eve paused at the edge of the platform, her pale hair whipped by the wind.

  She leapt.

  I forgot all about Vann, who lay gasping and choking some ten feet away, his ribs battered in. I forgot about Lucas, painfully hauling himself upright. All I could think of was that pale head, vanishing straight down. Eve!

  I flung myself after her, my boots grinding in broken bits of laserifle, and was just gaining momentum when the entire side of the tower shattered and the hellhound landed with a thud on the platform, which was swaying in earnest now. Demon warding sparked and fizzed, fluorescing into the visible range as something huge and powerful as a magickal tornado exploded below somewhere in the tower, like a freight hover looming up out of nowhere under a slicboard. It was that explosion that saved me, the tower bucking at the precise moment the winged hellhound leapt for me; the heaving of the entire edifice knocking me off my feet and sending me rolling toward the edge, my sword hammered from my hand and skittering along the platform’s floor.

  Sword get your sword that thing’s coming for you, it’s coming for you, get up and kill it and go after her— My fingers closed on the hilt as I scrabbled, and chaos boi
led behind me. The whine of plasbolts mixed with a high squealing roar told me the hellhound had been hit; I rolled to my feet, body moving with inhumanly precise coordination as my mind struggled to keep up, to control the motion. I skidded, gained my feet, snapped one glance back, and saw the hellhound crouching as plasgun bolts peppered the platform around it. It leapt again, this time thankfully not aiming for me, and Lucas rolled aside as the thing crashed into where he had been standing a moment before. There was too much plasfire in the air to be accounted for, but I didn’t care.

  I turned back to the edge.

  The air became molten and my scar turned to clawed fire, nailing my feet in place. I almost overbalanced, wind screaming up and pouring over the platform in a wash of burned plas, hoverscorch, and the musky fume of demons. My shirt flapped in the wind, my whipping hair stinging my eyes.

  “Stop.” Japhrimel’s voice sliced through chaos.

  Poised on the brink, I looked back over my shoulder again. He halted, too far away, and his wings settled, the edges of his coat ruffling. His eyes burned, and behind him the hellhound snarled. More plasgun bolts whined. The streaks of silvery gray in his hair, new and shocking, threw back Paradisse’s light.

  Japhrimel took another step forward, his hands out, palms cupped. Demon blood smoked along his sleeves and the hem of his coat, and there was a spatter of it high on one gaunt cheek. “Dante,” he mouthed, and the world stopped its rolling inevitable course.

  His boots were wet, and he’d left dark bloody prints on the shattered floor of the platform. The tower heaved again and I heard a massive belling note of rage from below, a howl that chilled my blood and lifted every fine hair on my body. I could even feel the individual hairs on my scalp trying to rise.

  Demon. That’s a dying demon. Which one? I exhaled, the breath lasting forever.

  I no longer cared.

  “Dante.” Again, Japhrimel did not precisely speak, but mouthed the word. Or was there so much noise I couldn’t hear him, though a great silence had settled over the world?

  His voice bypassed my ears, smashing directly into my brain like carbolic flung across reactive. Come with me. You must come. Now. Sheer naked command in the words, wrapping around me and yanking.

  Demanding. Controlling me.

  Forcing me.

  Gods above and below, how I hate to be forced.

  My fingers loosened, and my sword chimed on the platform, Japhrimel’s will wresting it from my hand as easily as an adult might wrench a toy away from a small child.

  It is so easy to break a human. Especially a human woman. Claws buried in my chest, and the sound of my own screams as someone hurt me, invaded me, hurt me—

  I had thought nothing else inside me could break. But something deep-buried in my mind snapped and rose up like a shattered cable suddenly free of weight, a sheet of flame blinding me. My lips shaped one single word, the only thing I could say.

  No.

  The alpha and omega of my epitaph, what they would lasecarve on my urn when I finally was forced kicking and screaming into the dry land of Death.

  But not yet. I wasn’t finished yet. The hardest, most stubborn deep-buried core of me ignited even as my body betrayed me, already starting to shift its weight to obey him, to accept the inevitable and submit.

  To give in.

  No. The word boiled through me. I am not sure if I screamed, or if the roar was merely psychic, locked behind my rictus-grin of a face. The curtain between me and a black hole of something too terrible to be spoken or thought of pulled aside for a single heartstopping moment, and I remembered what had been done to me.

  Who had done it.

  And how much it had hurt.

  No. The single word filled me. I would not give in. I would not endure another rape of my body or my mind. I would not go gently into any dark night of submission. I would not be forced any further.

  I would die first.

  I tore myself free, and hurled my traitorous body out into empty space.

  The roar of the wind cradled me as I fell, arms and legs pulled close. A streak painted the air—my rings, boiling with golden light, their gems and silver screaming in defiant rage as I narrowed my welling eyes against the stinging hurricane.

  Looking for that pale head, the spot of brilliance I could aim for. What did I think I was going to do? I couldn’t survive a fall like this, and Eve had vanished. Paradisse wheeled crazily under me, hovertraffic reaching up to swallow my falling body, the buildings turning to streaks of amber, silver, and anemic gold.

  I couldn’t see her anywhere. Eve was gone, disappeared.

  A curious comfort spilled through me. I was going to die. None of it mattered anymore. I was done, and once in Death’s arms the Devil couldn’t harm me or involve me in any more games.

  A swift, piercing pain lanced through my heart. Japhrimel.

  He can’t save you, Danny. Nobody can. The truth whispered in my ears, in my fingers, in my heartbeat, which stupidly kept plowing ahead, not understanding or stubbornly ignoring the fact that I was dead, finally dead, that I was falling and it was over.

  Finally, blessedly over. My left cheek burned as the emerald embedded atop my accreditation tat spat a glowing-green spark, a high sudden fracture-pain as if I’d been punched hard enough to crack my cheekbone. The flash of green dyed the entire world for a timeless second before it was swallowed by the rip of torn air.

  Flying, a bubble of something hot behind my lips, my clothes fluttering and snapping as my body relaxed, tumbling through space and time, synth-perfume filling my nose—apples, musk, peaches, fresh-mown grass.

  If you have to die, Paradisse is a good place to do it. Why is this taking so long?

  Then, the impossible. Tumbling in freefall, completely free for the first time in my whole miserable existence—

  Fingers closed around my wrist and a jolt of arrested motion popped my shoulder from its socket with a sickening crunch.

  I screamed. Wings beat, filling the air with crazy mixtures of synth-perfume tainted with the dark musk of demon, familiar to me as breath. I hung pinned between the point of no return and the absolute freedom of death, the world spinning frantically as the sound of straining wings and a long howl of effort smashed through my head. My arm stretched like elastic, tendons creaking and popping as the rooftop loomed below us, flowing nacreous pearl. It was another tower, and I flinched away from the impending shock, screaming again until the bubble behind my lips broke and sweet spicy black demon blood filled my mouth.

  Impact. A crunching, hideous shock drove me out of myself, ribs snapping, the force of the fall broken just enough to keep me from dying on impact. Something in my other arm snapped too, and I was flung across the rooftop like a doll, rolling limp as a rag. Plasteel buckled and bent, an invisible layer of force closing around me, cushioning, a flexible shield stopping me just short of a climate-control housing shaped like a whipped confection of spun plasteel and plasglass.

  Warm wetness dripped into my eyes. I lay against the housing, blinking, my breath stuttering out in an abused howl.

  I saw him rolling too, shedding momentum as his wings gracefully bled the force away from his body, rising in a perfectly coordinated movement and whirling, a familiar curve of steel in his hands. He drove my sword into the rooftop with one economic movement, shaking his hand out as blue sparks popped and snarled between him and the hilt. He turned, his wings beginning to flow back down to armor him, a flash of his narrow golden chest heaving as he filled his lungs—

  —and the winged hellhound streaked down from the sky and hit him with a bone-shattering crunch.

  Japhrimel! Agony roared through me, preternatural flesh stretched to its limits, bones struggling to reknit themselves, a tide of black demon blood smashing through my lips as I coughed, creaking sounds spearing through my chest as my ribs snapped out, mending themselves. The scar turned into a red-hot drill, and if I could have breathed through the convulsions I would have screamed again, pointlessly,
as the flurry of motion disappeared, driven past my line of sight by the collision.

  My arms boiled red-hot with pain as I made it up to elbows-and-knees, realizing I wasn’t healing fast enough. Black blood should have been welling up and closing the wounds, sealing them away—but more blood pattered on the rooftop as I scrabbled, my fingers slipping in slick hot wetness as the air closed around me, suffocatingly heavy. Material ripped as my claws extended, shearing through plasteel and fabric alike. Gunfire echoed behind me, and the snarls of the hellhound made the whole building shake like a flower on a slender stem.

  Get up! Get up and fight! Stark terror boiled up through my mouth as I coughed more blood.

  Every cell in my body rebelled. I forgot his betrayal, I forgot my own, I forgot everything but the need to get to my feet and fling myself at the thing that was going to kill him.

  I don’t know why. It was an instinctive response, like jerking your hand back from a red-hot stove.

  Power smashed through the scar, flaring down my skin and sparking into the visible range, black-diamond flames twisting through the trademark sparkles of a Necro-mance’s aura. My shielding, smashed and rent, cracked open, and for one dizzying eternal moment the entire city of Paradisse shattered through my skull again, as if I had once more opened the taplines in Notra Dama and ripped a hole in the world.

  The assault smashed me flat onto the floor of the roof, blood sizzling with the heavy odor of decaying fruit. My shields closed, mended by the thunderbolt of pure Power spilling through me. I heard my own voice from very far away, an animal’s howl, breaking in the higher registers as it spiraled into a deathscream.