Incorruptible

by Lilith Saintcrow

  “She always is.” It was time to get to work, and at least the Incorruptible wasn’t going anywhere this afternoon. “Been here long enough to figure that out.”

  He could begin soothing the lumina. The trouble was, he didn’t have any damn idea how. At least when he was waiting for the inevitable end in an abandoned world, he hadn’t been at risk of complete failure. The test had arrived, and he’d almost been caught napping.

  A few minutes later, Sarah spun the wheel holding tickets, vengeful joy glittering in her gaze as paper fluttered. Jenna lingered nearby, tying her apron with thoughtless, habitual movements. Michael leaned forward, ostensibly to examine the orders.

  “—fuckwad,” Sarah finished, a venomous hiss. “I’m about to dump his ass.”

  “I’m sure it has nothing to do with your craving chocolate today.” Jenna’s smile, soft and pacific, lit her thin, wan face. She needed proper nutrition as well as a better coat; the black one she’d been wearing this morning was paper-thin. Her apartment building didn’t look too shabby, clinging to the edge of respectability, but there were more fitting places for an Incorruptible to rest. “What was it this time?”

  “Oh, he didn’t want to go dancing because his feet hurt.” Sarah glared over the shiny metal shelf under the heat-lamp. She had a generous mouth, pale lipgloss turned it into a landmark. “And this asshole’s getting snippy with me too.”

  “Lay off, okay?” Jenna barely glanced through the window, her shoulders hunching. “Mike’s a nice guy.”

  Had she really said that about him? Or were they talking about Ace? Michael froze, looking at the order slips but not seeing their cargo of scribbles.

  “Pfft.” Somewhat mollified, Sarah’s gaze lit with mischief. “Well, I guess I know who’s staked out a claim, huh?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Jenna made a face and the other woman laughed, tucking a pen in her reddish, hairspray-stiff mane before bouncing away, apparently soothed. At last the Incorruptible looked through the order window and essayed a weak smile, her dark eyes so shadowed with exhaustion they looked slightly bruised. “Hi. I’m, uh, sorry about that, it just kind of startled me.”

  “No worries.” No worries ever again, for you. It wasn’t anything the mortal man he was impersonating could say to her, but he could think it all he wanted, right? “I figured as much.”

  She studied him for a long moment, thoughts moving in those beautiful eyes. The marks along his arms and legs ran with sweet pain, and the ones on his trunk were padded whips of liquid fire. Even the curved scars on his back burned, a beautiful, strengthening ache.

  “Really,” Michael added. His hands moved independently, beginning prep for the clutch of orders Sarah had dropped off. “I was kicking myself for scaring you. Bob said to drive you to work, I figured he’d already let you know.” Blaming the boss was a time-honored tactic, and of course, some almost-falsehoods were permissible in the service of the Incorruptible.

  Anything that eased them or kept them safe until they could be closed in an Eyrie was acceptable, as long as there was no deviance or twisting in a legionnaire’s motives.

  “That explains it.” Jenna settled her tied apron, smoothing her skirt against her hips. Michael’s marks settled, sensing the draining-away of fear. “But it’s not really neces—”

  “I need this job,” Michael said, baldly, and hoped his expression was suitably neutral. It wasn’t quite acceptable to interrupt a lumina, and it wasn’t quite accurate—he didn’t need the job in the way she might think. The pay was a pittance, he had plenty saved.

  But he did need, very much, to stay protectively near this piece of the Principle until it could be gathered into safety.

  Social pressure, artfully applied, had its intended effect. “Fine.” Jenna tugged at her ponytail, making sure it was secure, and glanced at the tables rapidly filling for breakfast. “When are you off?”

  Another simple question he could answer simply. Michael liked those. “Same time as you.”

  “Bob.” She shook her head, the wavy ponytail bouncing and spreading, and sighed. “All right. I’d better get to work.”

  “Me too.” The hosannas were about to leap free of his skin and shatter on every surface. He had to be careful. Mortals might not notice a legionnaire, any display would make them turn instinctively aside. A lumina or lumino, though was exquisitely sensitive even without the Breath. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  That earned him a tight, mistrustful smile, still one to be treasured. “It’s just Jen, Mike.” And with that, she turned and set off, her sharp shoulders coming up to accept the weight of a burden she was probably unaware of carrying.

  Michael allowed himself one last look at her hair, glowing with reddish highlights and fighting the elastic she’d confined it with, and got to work.

  Little Softling

  It was a normal day except for one of her periodic headaches, the kind that sent a jagged drill bit right through her temples turned her neck into concrete-fouled rebar. The bell on the door jangled its discordant welcome, the sound going right through Jenna’s head, and she gritted her teeth.

  Since she was deep in a five-top that couldn’t decide if they wanted the special or not, the two men sat in Sarah’s section. The redhead, her jaw working furiously—Bob didn’t like her gum-chewing, but she flat-out refused to stop and raked in tips despite or because of it—smiled professionally as she swished her generous hips over to the new arrivals. A pair of businessmen, Jen thought, glancing at their suits and catching the gleam of a chunky watch on one thick, tanned wrist. Both of them were pretty broad in the shoulder, and Jenna sighed internally.

  A surfeit of testosterone rarely tipped well, but Sarah had her ways.

  The five-top finally settled on two specials and three burgers, each with something added or removed. Jenna made careful notes and escaped, retreating behind the counter to the pickup window. She spun the ticket and rubbed at her temples, where the headache was just getting on the road bigtime. Maybe the barometric pressure was rising, and they’d get some sun—which would make the nights icy, but she was almost past caring.

  It was time for a little light.

  “Head hurt?” Mike peered out through a pall of steam. His tattoos almost seemed to twitch, but that was just her tired eyes. “You should sit down.”

  “I’ve got a bunch of people wanting lunch, I can’t afford to sit down.” She almost said dipshits instead of people, and wondered where the sudden irritability came from. Maybe she needed some of Bob’s boiled coffee to get her through the afternoon. The headache was turning into a doozy, and her stomach was getting in on the act too. “You’re going to need a break soon, though.” He’d been at it since she arrived, and didn’t seem to mind she’d made a complete idiot out of herself earlier.

  “You worry about everyone, huh.” Mike’s smile, wide and seemingly genuine, almost managed to make her forget she was on her last nerve, too. “I’m tough, ma’am. Get some water, you look pale.”

  She felt pretty damn pale. Her shoulders were aching, too. Had she just not realized how tense she was? The bell on the door jangled again, the sound spearing her skull. “I think I will.”

  Bob spread his arms in exuberant greeting, welcoming yet more arrivals. The ice dispenser on the soda wall chugged, and she filled a paper cup before popping a cube in her mouth, her throat dry as baking glass. Was she coming down with a cold? That was the absolute last thing she needed.

  Her chin jerked aside a split second before Sarah let out a short, sharp, wordless cry.

  Jenna swung around, her hip bumping the soda wall’s lower cabinet door, which was always just slightly ajar. Just enough to chip a knee in passing before you learned the swinging, loose step that would save you from a painful barking on the patella. The ice threatened to shoot between her teeth, lunging for escape, and she swallowed a cough.

  At first what she saw made no sense. Sarah was bent over the businessmen’s table, her uniform skirt riding up and showing
the tender hollows behind her knees as well as her hamstrings tautening. At first Jenna thought it was a spill and took a step sideways, reaching for a stack of thirsty, over-bleached barmop towels. Her hand stopped halfway, because the guy sitting with his back to the second section pulled on Sarah’s arm again, tugging even further her over the table.

  “Hey!” Bob yelled, hurrying from the tables along the diner’s left-hand wall. “Hey, now!”

  The man holding Sarah’s wrist bared his teeth. His wide, bland, tanned face crumpled like aluminum foil, and Sarah made another strange sound, a muffled scream.

  A low, nasty hiss thrummed over every surface. The front windows, wide expanses of glass kept clean with immense effort and swearing on Bob’s part, rippled a little as if they’d forgotten they were solid. Jenna’s mouth dropped open and her pulse skyrocketed, her ears filling with damp cotton. The ice, crunched into two pieces because her jaw had snapped shut, went down her throat in a pair of cold, nausea-inducing lumps, hitting her cramping stomach and vanishing.

  Thick silence filled the SunnyTime, even the fluorescents halting their buzzing, and every shadow turned black as ink, warping strangely at the corners. Panic poured down her ice-tickled throat, tinted with copper as if her teeth had cut her cheek again when Eddie’s palm met her skin one breathless-hot August night.

  Stay on the straight and narrow, Jen. His tone, oddly gentle when he was in the repentant phase. Stay on the fuckin’ straight and narrow, and we won’t have any problems.

  “There it is,” the one holding Sarah’s wrist said, the words falling into that awful hissing and emerging from it with every edge polished to a razor gleam. “Look.” And he raised one manicured, claw-twisting hand, pointing at Jenna.

  Are they bail people? Maybe Eddie skipped out on… The thought trailed, off, patently ridiculous but less so than the way everyone in the diner had frozen, some covering their mouths and staring wide-eyed, the five-top she’d just gotten orders from in various attitudes of shock and dismay, two truckers at the counter twisting on their stools to see what the hubbub was, Bob near the door with one foot on worn linoleum and the other hanging casually in midair.

  It was like the world had hit the pause button, but nobody had bothered to warn Jen and she couldn’t find the remote.

  The businessman facing the window rose, swelling upright in a fluid but hopelessly wrong movement, and Jenna’s left hand snapped up to her face, cupping over her mouth. And yet, nobody else moved.

  Hallucinating. I’m hallucinating. A clatter from the kitchen shattered the nasty hissing and brought both businessmen lunging fully upright. The one with Sarah’s wrist made a casual twisting motion, and a hideous crunching noise was lost underneath the clangor.

  The other businessman turned. His shape blurred, flickering between a tanned suit-wearing man indistinguishable from hundreds she’d brought food, soda refills, more fries, honey I think I want a scoop of ice cream with my pie and a high-shouldered, lean-nosed thing with dead white, ill-fitting skin and blazing yellowish eyes.

  Jenna felt a fuzzy, faraway comfort that she was only hallucinating in the middle of a panic attack. When the terror receded she would shake her head, take deep gulping breaths, and do her best to cover up her lapse in sanity.

  “At last,” the bigger businessman hissed, and the throbbing scrape-noise returned, twisting the shadows even further. Jenna’s red paper cup of crushed and cubed ice had left her hand somehow and was arrested halfway to the floor, just hanging there.

  None of this matters. She stood very still, her ribs flickering as she tried to breathe through the asphyxiating noise.

  “That’s right,” the thing in the businessman’s body crooned. “That’s right, little softling. It will all be over sssoon.” The last word became a terrible, drilling hiss.

  Jenna’s eyelids turned leaden, fell. The blackness was sudden and very soft, not like the hurtful shadows outside.

  The swinging door to the kitchen and the short employees-only hallway gave its particular squeak-thump. Her eyelids warmed, the darkness behind them turning crimson.

  Light. From where? It didn’t matter, it was a sign the panic attack was letting up.

  At least, that’s what Jenna thought before she opened her eyes again with a harsh, sweat-prickling effort, and saw Mike the new cook step in front of her, his broad back under a white T-shirt blessedly normal and proportionate. Hot water trickled down her cheeks, because he was glowing.

  No, not really. A halo of clarity leaked from his skin and shirt and his worn jeans; his big, thick-soled boots placed lightly on the peeling linoleum behind the counter.

  “No.” Mike’s voice rolled and boomed, rattling everything in the diner. Forks chattered, coffee cups jiggled, but Bob and the customers didn’t move, frozen mid-frame in some mad movie that held things like the not-businessmen the cook was mercifully shielding her view of. “Leave now, diaboli, and I shall not pursue you.”

  Oh, God, Jenna thought. He’s in my hallucination. That can’t be good.

  Sliptime

  Contrasted with the painful uncertainty of coaxing a new Incorruptible into trusting him enough for summary extraction, this was a relief. Battle was, after all, what Michael was bred for, and it mattered little whether it was here or in a filthy alley at midnight. The Legion met the unclean wherever they were found—in penthouse suites, on rural backroads, or anywhere between.

  The thought that the two unclean would have found Jenna unguarded a bare few days ago was almost as bad as the suspicion he’d somehow led them here. The city’s diaboli had rarely challenged him, and he made sure whispers of more legionnaires circulated just infrequently enough to be true. For all Michael knew, he could be the only one of his kind posted here, a lonely outpost with an Eyrie barely within driving range—but there was no reason to make the unclean suspect as much.

  So he simply stood, loose and easy, his hands relaxed but singing with grace, the half-sweet pain of battlerage throttled but still spreading from him in a haze. Behind him, the column of living light that was an Incorruptible emitted a soft chiming song of distress.

  “Legion.” The smaller unclean made a spitting sound as it hunched its misshapen shoulders, sinking its claws cruelly into the redhead waitress’s broken arm. “We thought your kind all fled.”

  It was the larger unclean with its frame smoking with glamour to fool mortal senses Michael worried about, because the fume drifting off it reached two high, quivering points above its malformed shoulders. Not very high, a handspan at most, but still…that was troublesome. If an Incorruptible didn’t have the Breath yet, the wingèd unclean could sometimes cause something close to an allergic reaction. Which was the very last thing he wanted for tired, pale Jenna.

  “Give us the softling.” The larger unclean’s entire body twisted, and it shuffled forward. “We shall leave thee in peace.”

  “He won’t leave good prey.” The smaller sank its claws into the redhead’s back, a meaty, crunching sound. “They never do.”

  They meant only to lull him; the larger unclean darted forward in a skittering rush, leaving a boiling black streak on somnolent air. Normally, he would have simply moved aside and dealt it a glancing blow to begin the process of bleeding and maddening until he could kill it with little trouble. But the column of light at his back was achingly vulnerable, and narrowed his options.

  They often thought, those unclean, that just because a legionnaire was economical with his force he perhaps did not have enough to overwhelm. Michael’s fist flashed out. He didn’t even bother to call upon a weapon, just met the clawed, smoking-hot paw with his broad, scarred knuckles.

  He had a moment of clear sweet satisfaction that he’d gauged the force so precisely, and a static-laden howl rose from the larger unclean as its carapace shattered, spraying thick amber ichor. Michael’s fist opened, wrist snapping up, and he grabbed the thing’s arm, suddenly inside its strike range. The grace filling him turned slicing-sharp at his fingertips, and t
he thing howled as he ripped the appendage free of its shoulder-joint with an unholy creaksplatter.

  It was another simple matter to pivot and strike the thing on its chest, flat palm colliding with cloth and carapace, a crunch like clay jars smashing. It went flying, streaking yet more ichor and a ribbon of smoking foulness, and Michael was already past, leaping after the smaller one.

  Which had decided a member of the Legion was best left to its larger friend, but was not quite willing to let go of helpless prey. A shambling leap, and it thrust its clawed hands through the chest of a man at the five-top, bringing gristle-gobbets to its razortooth yawn and chowing down.

  Michael collided with the thing, wine-dark fury filling him from crown to soles. Mortal bodies shivered in place as he flew, their cells absorbing concussive shocks, unable to flee even on an elemental level. The table went down, splintering as he ripped both life and spine from the small, thieving unclean, rising from its wreckage with a shake to splatter foulness away from the clear light of grace.

  Sliptime blurred and flexed. The wingèd one bared its glassy, serrated teeth. It twitched in Jenna’s direction, but Michael had already leapt, landing protectively before her with a jolt as the thing cackled in its hissing, brutish language and streaked for the door instead of attacking. Glass shattered outward, and as a final insult the diabolo minoro eviscerated Bob in passing, splattering gray-steaming guts far and wide. Blood sprayed, and the musical distress tolling behind Michael sharpened.

  Of course. Without the Breath she would be trapped in sliptime, only able to see shutterclicks of disaster and mutilation.

  The larger unclean had escaped. It would bring word to its fellows, and Michael wondered for a split second if he had moved to shield her instead of attacking because he wanted the diaboli to know the Legion was still alive and the Principle enfleshed, because he wanted the Incorruptible frightened and possibly dependent upon him…or both, perhaps?