Whoever had tied me up had done a goddamn messy job of it. I stilled, watching the silver in my hair run with blue sparks under the smooth metal surfaces. Hellbreed contamination in the air, but not a lot of it.
I saw concrete, a crumbling wall threaded with thin trickles of dried nameless fluid. I was in the dark, but electric light played over a vertical edge, a corner with teeth where the concrete had been worn away.
My eyes fell shut again. I was so tired. Even my toes hurt. Even my hair hurt. And I was starving. I would have given about anything for a chicken-fried steak right about then. And a nice cold beer.
Jill, wake up. My own voice, soft and urgent. Wake the fuck up. Something’s happening right in front of you.
The scar ran with wet heat. My wrists rubbed against each other, and the hunger shifted under my breastbone, turned steely and sickening. I heard nylon rubbing against a cross-beam as a body shifted below, dead fruit. You’re tied up with the same type of rope. Wake up, Jill.
It was like a bucket of cold water. I snapped into full consciousness silently, my wrists rubbing, the scar turning hot. It burrowed in toward the bone, and I wondered if it would slip my control and fill with yellow flame again.
The idea of burning expanded my chest with unsteady glee. I clamped down on it, reflexively.
Can’t afford to do that, no matter how good it feels. I blinked crusted something out of my eyes, felt the tingle along my skin as the last bullet hole in my chest closed over, the silver-coated slug pushed free and no longer hurting me. The scar hummed, the strings of the physical world thrumming like a violin touched by a master’s fingertips. Just the slightest plucking, making subtle vibrational music.
Something was about to happen.
Too late. It’s too late.
Hopelessness threatened to scour the inside of my head. Bullshit it’s too late, I answered that whining little voice. Get out of these ropes, Jill. That’s the first step. Everything else comes from that.
I rubbed my wrists together like Lady Macbeth. The skin on my entire body tautened. They hadn’t even taken my trench off, the dumb bunnies. And the rope had plenty of give in it—enough for my purposes, anyway. Etheric force tingled in my swollen fingertips, my concentration falling into itself like a rock down a bottomless well, and tough nylon frayed, parting.
It took all my waning energy to keep the state of fierce relaxation so necessary for sorcery. Strand by strand, the rope parted. Nervous silence ticked on the other side of the wall, broken only by the sound of breathing and the occasional wet kiss or moan.
“What if they don’t show?” the male said, fretfully.
“They have to show,” Irene said, with utter mad certainty. “We’re holding all the cards, Fax. Just relax.”
I wondered, for a few seconds, how she’d gotten free of Galina. Either she’d tricked the Sanctuary—hard to do, but Galina had that core of blind decency that made her able to do what she did—or there had been violence. It was vanishingly possible that she might have overwhelmed Galina physically for long enough to escape, but treachery was more likely.
Inside a Sanctuary’s house, the owner’s will is law. It had to have been a trick. But if she’d hurt Galina, the Trader bitch was going to pay in blood.
That’s not the only thing she’s going to pay for, Jill. Get out of the rope.
My concentration slipped. Sweat trickled cold down the valley of my spine, a flabby fingertip tracing. I regained myself, felt more strands slip, fraying loose under the knife of my will.
“They’re late,” Fairfax whined.
If it hadn’t been so critical to keep quiet, I might have laughed. They’re expecting hellbreed they’ve double-crossed to be on time. Silly them.
“They usually are. Will you just relax?” Irene’s tone held less fondness and more command now. Movement in the light told me someone was pacing, sound of high heels clicking. No more kisses, and no more soft words.
The air pressure changed like a storm front moving over the city, pushing thunder in front of it. These two Trader idiots were about to get a huge surprise, either from their visitors—or from me. Copper coated my palate, adrenaline dumping into my bloodstream to sharpen me and deaden the edge of exhaustion. This is about to get real ugly real quick. Hurry, Jill.
A general rule of sorcery is that more haste equals less speed—but the rope fell loose, and I eased my shoulders out of its coils. My hands were numb and tingling, but they worked. I just couldn’t pull a trigger for a little while. Pins and needles raced up my legs, and I almost blacked out when I bent over to take care of the rope messily looped and pulled tight around my ankles.
Rule one of tying up a hunter: you’d better be damn sure she can’t wriggle out. Nylon’s useless. Hemp’s better, but it stretches too. Orichalc-tainted chains are the best, but even those are workable if the hunter’s left alone and conscious long enough.
I’ve only been chained up so bad I couldn’t get out once. That was enough for me.
They’d taken my guns. But my knives were still all present and accounted for, along with my whip and everything else, even all the ammo in my pockets.
Jesus. People this stupid shouldn’t be playing with hellbreed. The air sharpened, the swelling in my fingers going down too slowly, way too fucking slowly, and I heard them arrive.
The air was suddenly full of hissing like laughter, the subliminal reverberation of Helletöng rubbing painfully against my ears. I eased myself off the chair, quiet, quiet, stopping when my right thigh cramped viciously. I kept my breathing soft and even. Raised my hands over my head to help my fingers drain. I would need them soon.
My hands turned into fists. Rivers of sparkling pain ran down my arms. I eased them open, and made a fist again. It would help the edema drain. Come on. No time, Jill.
On the other side of the wall, there was a wet crunching sound. A sudden impact, like a side of beef dropped three stories onto simmering pavement.
Funtime’s over, kids. Everyone out of the pool.
Irene let out a shapeless, garbled yell.
In the ringing silence afterward, Shen An Dua spoke. “Oh, I am sorry. I was supposed to negotiate, wasn’t I.”
There was a slobbering wet noise, and another crunch. “Dear me.” Shen giggled, a little-girl sound. “So sorry. I just keep making mistakes.”
“You idiot.” Irene’s voice trembled. “Now you’ve killed the only person who has the formula!”
Another chill giggle, edged with broken, freezing glass. “Oh, I haven’t killed him. He’ll heal, with the proper care—care I can provide, as your liege. Besides, now I know what is possible, and it is easy enough to find more scientists.” The hellbreed’s tone darkened. “Where is the hunter?”
I dropped my hands. So glad I’m not tied up right now. My fingers curled around knifehilts, clumsy and aching. More copper adrenaline dumped into my blood, enough to sharpen me, not enough to blur. I’d pay for it later, when my body’s reserves finally gave out.
I let out the soft breath, took another, my lungs crying for oxygen I couldn’t take in. No use in gasping and advertising my position and status as awake and reasonably ready to kick ass.
“Fax?” Sounds of material moving, probably her long sequined dress. The hardness had left Irene’s voice. “Fax, hold on—Fax! Fairfax don’t you leave me!”
She sounded like a victim. Maybe like one of her own victims. I doubted she’d see the irony if someone else pointed it out, though.
“Oh, shut up.” Another impact, and the wall in front of me quivered imperceptibly as something human-sized was thrown up against it hard enough to crack bones. Shen let out a little satisfied sound. “Whining. Always whining.”
I tensed all over. The scar thrummed against my wrist, a high-voltage wire.
Shen suddenly turned all business. “Spread out. Search for the hunter. She’s close, I can smell the bitch’s shampoo.”
Lunatic laughter bubbled up in my throat. I swallowed it. What’s wro
ng with my goddamn shampoo?
“That’s the last order you’ll ever give,” Irene snarled, and I crouched reflexively as gunfire rang through the small space, echoes tearing and re-tearing at my sensitive eardrums.
Maybe I could stay right here and let them sort it out. But something hit the other side of the wall again, bone-crunchingly hard, and I was out of my little hole and in the light of a swinging, naked electric bulb before I even noticed moving. The flap of my abused coat followed me like the smell of burning, clinging to me in tatters.
Four of them, and all you’ve got is knives.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. My left hand had been smarter than me, curling around the whip handle and jerking it free. I guess Irene and Fax had thought I was tied up too tight to use a whip.
Fucking morons. They shouldn’t have been playing with hellbreed.
Confined space, a concrete cube, the smell of blood cooking on an incandescent bulb as it swayed crazily, making the shadows dance. A slight hiss of steam echoed the longer hiss of hellbreed.
Shen An Dua stood, incongruous in a pale-pink kimono patterned with plum blossoms, her narrow golden hands folded and her eyes running with yolk-yellow flame. Her hair was piled atop her head in a complex patterned knot, held in place by lacquered shine and chopsticks with dangling things reflecting hard darts of light. And here was my first piece of good luck. In her monumental arrogance, Shen hadn’t brought full ’breed to the party.
No, she’d brought four Traders, all male, and the whip smacked across flesh and dropped one, screaming, to the floor, clutching at his face and howling loud enough to shake the entire concrete cube.
Shen screeched, but the knife left my hand, flickering through the dance of shadow and blood-dappled light, and I had a second piece of good luck. It buried itself up to the hilt in her right eye as the whip crackled again, catching the next Trader at the top of his leap. I moved aside, spinning on feet gone numb and scraping-slow, and my hand flicked again, coming up full of steel.
Move move move! The screaming inside my head was no match for the noise bouncing off the walls until I tuned it out, focusing instead on the Trader closest to me, a cute little number who might have been Puerto Rican while he was human. Now he was small, brown, and unholy quick; the mirrored surfaces coming up from his cheekbones and inserting into his eyebrows gave him permanent sunglasses. He was right next to me before I realized it, but instinct saved me again—my fist, full of knifehilt, blurred forward and his trachea collapsed with a crunch.
Guys always expect you to go for the nut-shot. They never expect a rabbit-punch to the throat. And no matter how good you are, if you can’t breathe, your fighting effectiveness is numbered in bare seconds.
Just to be safe, I slid the knife between his ribs, high in the left side of his chest, punching with a generous share of hellbreed strength to get through the pericardium—if I was that lucky.
Shen hit the floor, wailing, and I got a glance up her kimono skirt. If I’d eaten anything recently I would have thrown it all up, again, but the animal in me was concerned with survival first, snapping me aside with a half-skip and a clatter of steelshod bootheels to free my footing from the Trader’s spasming legs.
Gunfire echoed again, and the third Trader—a stocky motherfucker in motorcycle leathers, his ears coming to high bristling points—collapsed, a neat hole appearing in his forehead and the back of his head vaporizing. Irene was picking her shots.
Let’s just hope I’m not her next target, eh?
I hit the ground, rolled, and kicked the knees of the last Trader, he went down in a heap and I fed him a few knives to keep him quiet.
I lay there for just a second and a half too long, my sides heaving and my body suddenly failing to obey me. Wait just a minute, bitch, my muscles informed me. We’re declaring mutiny. You’ve fucked with us for too long.
The body will do what the will dictates, yes. I learned that in my first year of training. But sometimes, even the will isn’t enough to get the body up off the floor, when you’ve forced flesh past the point of no return. Even a berserker will eventually get tired.
Shen landed on me, tentacles swarming, thick black gore slicking her right cheek. Probing, flexible hairy pseudo-fingers bit hard, helped along by tiny vicious suckers, each rimmed with sharp cartilaginous protrusions resembling teeth. Peeked up the skirt of destiny, did we? the merry voice of impending doom snarled inside my head. About to pay for it, Jill. And pay for it big.
Slim strong human-shaped fingers tightened around my throat, and if my cervical spine hadn’t been hellbreed-reinforced, my neck would have snapped. I kicked, my knee sinking into fleshy pulsing warmth nesting under her kimono and finding precious little bone to bounce off. My abraded wrists swarmed with tentacles, and she exhaled sicksweet foulness in my face, squeezing harder now, black ichor dripping from her pointed chin and splashing my face.
I spat, defiant to the last, and heaved up. No dice. She had too much leverage. Judo doesn’t teach you how to fight off tentacles, goddammit.
The gun roared again.
The unwounded half of Shen’s head disintegrated. Silver grain loaded in hollowpoints will do that. Black ichor spattered my face, stinking as it rotted.
The tentacles spasmed. Her hands bit in once more, terribly, but I wriggled free. My own fingers tore hers away, and I took in a gasping, whooping breath.
Irene was sobbing. The Trader whose larynx I’d crushed was suffocating to death, thrashing on the floor, a knifehilt protruding from his chest. Someone else was dying in leaps and spasms. I scrabbled through the crowded space, noticing for the first time that I was bleeding. Someone had clawed me in the side, my wrists were wet and dripping, my legs ached savagely, and I was blinking away both crusted and fresh blood. Not to mention the hellbreed-stinking gore dumped all over me.
There was the click of a half-depressed trigger, and I looked up. Ohshit.
But Irene stood, straddle-legged, over the Puerto Rican Trader. “Bobby,” she whispered, and pulled the trigger. I tried not to flinch. “You should have listened to me.” She let out a sound like a choked sob, and again the gun spoke.
Silence descended. There was a smear of thick crimson beginning near the ceiling, on the wall I’d been tied up behind. It looked about the size of an adult male, as if a man-sized canvas bag of blood had been flung at the wall and slid down, sopping-wet.
I gained my feet in a convulsive movement. The entire goddamn place was only about ten by ten, too small a space for the carnage it held. Pipes clustered at the far end. The naked, blood-spattered bulb swung in ever-decreasing arcs.
Irene hunched over something near the wall. The gun dangled limply in her hand. “Fax,” she whispered.
I coughed, deep and racking. Fax wasn’t going to mix any more bioweapons for anyone. Pretty much every bone in his body was broken, and the odd shape of his head meant his skull was crushed. Thin red blood, only a little tainted with hellbreed black, slicked his face and spattered his now-grimy lab coat.
I tried to feel something other than hot nasty satisfaction. Got what you deserved. Bile whipped the back of my throat as the thought of his “subjects” crawled under the surface of my consciousness, refusing to surface fully.
Thank God for small mercies. It wasn’t much, but I’d take it.
I found my other guns near the ruins of what looked like a wooden chair. It had been smashed to splinters, and it looked like the chair Winchell had been beaten in.
Shen must have thought I’d be easy to take out. My, isn’t this tying up nicely. Three guns, Irene had the fourth, and I had a bead on her even while my left hand picked up the two leftover Glocks and holstered them independently of me.
I coughed again, tasted blood and the bitterness of exhaustion. My neck was going to be bruised.
“Fax,” Irene whispered again. “Oh, God.”
I checked all the other bodies. They were twitch-rotting, fast, contagion spreading through tissues and loosing a powerfu
l stench into the air. I kept the gun trained on Irene.
Dead and rotting meant they were no threat. But God, it smelled. If there’s anything I hate about my job, it’s the varied odors of rot and corruption.
Not to mention almost getting killed on a regular basis. Or getting lied to so frequently I barely even trust myself anymore.
Or how even a job that ties itself up can feel almost like a failure. I’d been caught assuming too often on this one, and how many people could have died if I hadn’t been lucky? Or if I’d been just, simply, too late and a high-class hellbreed had stepped through to sit down and have himself a feast?
I took two steps forward, over the tangled ruin of a body. Fury worked its way up inside me, I blinked more blood out of my eyes.
Irene didn’t move, crouched on her high heels, her knees splayed. The green tint to her skin was pronounced under the bloodspattered light.
“What did you do to Galina?” I husked.
“I threatened to shoot the detective unless she let me go.” Her slim fingers opened. The gun clattered, came to rest right next to Fairfax’s dead, crushed hand. “Goddammit.”
“You’re playing out of your league.” The gun barrel met the back of her head, through that blood-colored hair. She didn’t move. “Who else is in on this? Harvill, Shen, who else?”
“They’re mostly dead.” The words were colored with a sob, but I didn’t miss her shifting her weight slightly, very slightly. She froze when I shoved the gun against her skull again, harder. “Fax and I, we were trying to fix it, once we realized what they were planning. Bernardino killed the widow and I took care of Winchell, but we didn’t find the ledgers. We couldn’t pressure Harvill without them. Shen sold me to Bernardino to keep him quiet, he was a pile of filth. I enjoyed killing him, but he didn’t have the ledgers and it all went… Fax. He was…”
Yeah, you were trying to fix it, and blackmail a few people in the process. A nice little nest egg, there for the taking, but Bernie had plans of his own. Enough double-crosses to make everyone dizzy, all of you little fucking rats scurrying once the lights turned on.
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