"Japh?" I dug in my bag. "Hey."
He didn't move. Stood with his head down, his eyes closed, leaning his entire weight against his hand on the door. His shoulders slumped, as if he was tired.
"Japhrimel?" I saw no complex twisting of Power that would tell me he was performing a work of magick. Saw nothing but the same black-diamond glitter of his aura, hard and impenetrable, shouting his essential difference. He was demon, he wasn't human.
I'd ahnost forgotten that, before. Never again, I promised myself. Still… I couldn't help trying to get through to him. I was an idiot.
For him, I seemed to be nothing but.
He looked back over his shoulder, his face arranged in its usual ironic mask and his shoulders coming back up to their accustomed straight line. "You should rest, Dante."
"Come on over." I patted the bed next to me. Plasilica whispered as I lowered the bag with my most important purchase in it to the floor. I'd bought another small statue of Anubis to replace the one I'd lost, this one easily able to fit in my palm and carved out of a single chunk of black marble veined with gold. The other thing that mattered-the statue of Sekhmet, repaired with infinite care-sat on the bedstand, glassy obsidian glowing mellow. "Please?" He crossed the room slowly, lowered himself down. The bed creaked. I finished digging in my messenger bag, easing the strap over my head and settling the bag itself on my other side with a sigh. Carrying the damn thing never got any easier.
"Close your eyes." The remains of my good mood and the excitement of the Souk made me smile. I'll just try this one more time.
He studied my face for a long few moments before complying.
I undid the clasp and leaned close, my bag clinking as it slid against the bed. Then I settled the sapphire against his coat and fiddled with the clasp, my fingers suddenly clumsy. It took a little while, and when I retreated I found he'd opened his eyes. He looked at me like I'd just done something extraordinary.
"There." I felt very pleased with myself. "I think it suits you."
He said nothing.
A little bit of the good mood slipped away. Then a little more. He examined my face, his eyes moving from my forehead to my mouth to my cheeks to my chin to my eyes and then repeating the process again.
Great. He doesn't like it. He probably doesn't like me very much either right now. If he'd just listen to me. Shame rose inside me. Rebuffed by a demon, a new low even in my dating life. "If you don't like it, I-"
"No." He set his jaw. "It's beautiful, Dante. Thank you." He didn't sound thankful. He sounded flat, and a little amused, and terribly furious. I wondered if he was going to hurt me again, and kept his hands in view. He could move with eerie blurring demon speed, but I might still have a little warning if he decided to get nasty with me again.
It didn't take much sometimes to tell what he was feeling-you only had to look closely enough to see the tiny changes, a millimeter's quirk to the eyebrow, a fractional lift of a corner of his mouth, a slight flaring of one elegant nostril. The ever-so-tiny lift of one shoulder. I used to think he wasn't as beautiful as Lucifer, looked blandly normal.
Well, Dante, you were wrong on that one.
My chest was on fire, a pain that wasn't cal wound lying against my heart. Why does this hurt so much? "You don't sound happy." I was too tired to keep the hurt out of my voice. "Did I just violate some arcane demon protocol by giving you a present?"
He shook his head. I waited, got nothing else.
"Fine." I turned away, grabbed my bag's strap and my sword, and slid off the bed. Padded around to the other side, then dropped down and stretched out, wiggling my bare toes and almost groaning as comfort closed around me. My bag settled against my stomach, I clasped my sword in my hands. "Take it off and burn it if you don't like it. I don't care." After all, you held me up against a wall and lied to me. You're a bastard.
Why can't I hate you?
Long pause. Silence ticked through the room, only slightly marred by hovertraffic and desert wind outside, the call of a candyseller on the corner, the humming of the containment field over the window. Mosquito netting on the bed, pulled aside, swayed on the breeze. I saw a corner of a chair and a slice of plaster wall before tears blurred my vision and I closed my eyes.
"What would you have me do?" Japhrimel's voice, surprisingly, was raw and hoarse. Probably with fury.
It took a few swallows before I could reply through the stone in my throat. "Give a little," I managed. "Tell me what's going on. Don't lie to me. Quit manhandling me when I don't do what you want. And for the sake of every god that ever was, quit being so… so-"
"Inhuman? Is that the word?" Terrible sadness weighted his tone. "How many times must I tell you that I will act to protect you; I will not bother you with trifles? You need only obey my requests, Dante, and this will be easier."
Obey? Are you going to start beating me like a pimp beats his favorite hooker? "Don't hunt Eve." My voice was muffled, I pressed my left hand against my mouth. "Please. If you ever cared about me at all, don't do it." I'll do anything you want, Japh, just leave Doreen's little girl alone. Hurt me if you have to, but leave her alone.
"I will not risk you in a rebellion doomed to failure. The Androgyne is young, untested. She cannot win, Dante. I will not lose you to her foolishness. Why will you not understand?"
The injustice rose to choke me. I swallowed it, tried again. "You don't have to declare yourself on her side. We can look anywhere in the world for her, Japh. We just don't look too hard. In seven years the contract's over, we're free, and you-"
His voice drained all the warmth from the room, made the air stir uneasily. "How free do you think the Prince will leave us if these four are not caught and brought to his justice? It is a choice between them and us. They will die, or we will. And if she has clouded your head with some appeal or treachery, it becomes my task to save you from yourself."
Silence. Soughing of the wind as it rose at dusk, the sun sinking below the arc of the horizon and night reaching up to fold ageless desert and ancient city in its embrace.
"You want to save me from myself, and you'll hurt me if I don't do what you want. Is that it?" I swallowed dryly. Tensed myself, waited for him to explode.
"I am sorry. I am a fool." Well, chalk it up to a miracle, he sounded sorry for once. "I do not mean to hurt you. You do not understand, and it frustrates me past all reason when you will not listen-will not see. When the escaped are brought to Lucifer's justice, you may extract whatever penance you desire from me. Until then, we are at war. It is us or it is them, and I will not have it be us."
"It's not a choice between them and us, Tierce Japhrimel." It was my turn to sound sad. "It's your choice between me and Lucifer." A bitter laugh rose up in me, was savagely repressed, escaped anyway. "Guess I know where your real loyalty lies."
"If it pleases you, continue to think so." He rose, the bed creaking slightly as his weight moved. "When this is finished, I will ask an apology for that accusation."
You might get one, if we can hash this out between now and then. If we have time, between whatever's going down with Gabe and whatever Lucifer's cooking up next. I would have cursed, but he closed the door to the bedroom before I could. I clamped my left hand around my katana's scabbard, the right around the hilt, and settled down to brood before we had to catch the transport. The tears dried up, leaving my eyes dry and hot, scoured by a whole desert's worth of sand.
Chapter 6
I hate traveling transport, and my recent experiences with hovers falling on me hadn't cured me of it. It was with profound relief that I stepped onto the concrete dock under a familiar plasilica dome and filled my lungs with soupy chemical-laden tang, the familiar cold radioactive glow of Saint City's power well rising to greet me.
Goddamn, it's good to be home. The thought surprised me; I'd never considered the place home before. Never thought about what home would feel like.
Lucas jostled me from behind, Leander sighing as he worked the kinks out of his neck
. "Damn transports." the Necromance said, and I felt sneakingly glad my own claustrophobia was shared by at least one member of our little troupe.
I looked over my shoulder. To the side, Japhrimel murmured to McKinley, who had showed up on the transport dock at midnight in Cairo, along with Tiens. The Nichtvren left to help Vann with whatever errand Japhrimel had sent him on, and the black-clad Hellesvront agent had boarded the transport with us. I didn't like that. The man-if you could call either Vann or McKinley a "man"-made me nervous. The oddly silver metallic coating on his left hand puzzled me too. I still didn't have the faintest idea what the Hellesvront agents were, precisely, but they were part of the net of financial and other assets the demons had in place on earth. Vann had said something about "vassals." Maybe they were organized into a feudal system, like some federated Freetowns.
Which meant that Vann and McKinley were loyal to Japhrimel-if they weren't exclusively loyal to Lucifer. Either way, neither of them was likely to be any help to me, or to give me any information. The Nichtvren didn't seem very likely to help me either.
Which left me with Lucas, Leander, and my own wits. Put that way, I seemed damn near rich. The Deathless and another Necromance were far from the worst backup I could have.
Don't say that, Danny. You're dealing with demons. All the backup in the world might not be enough.
As I watched, McKinley nodded and set off for the other end of the dock, apparently given his marching orders. Japhrimel watched him for a moment, but the mark on my shoulder was alive with heat. No matter that he was looking the other way, Japh's attention was all on me.
I wasn't quite sure how I felt about that. "Lucas?"
"Huh?" His whispering, painful voice barely reached through the sound of people disembarking. The North New York-Saint City transport run was a full one since both cities were hubs. That hadn't stopped us from having a whole first-class compartment to ourselves all the way from Cairo. Maybe Japhrimel had arranged for that, I didn't know. Didn't care, either.
"Two things," I said out of the corner of my mouth. "Find out what Japhrimel's business in Saint City is, and tell Abra I'll be coming by to see her. Good?"
"You got it." He detached himself from us and melted into the crowd. It was a relief to have a professional in my corner. Whatever Japh was up to, Lucas was my best bet of finding out sooner rather than later.
Leander raised an eyebrow as Japhrimel approached us, threading through a string of disembarking normals who didn't even look at him twice but cut a wide swath around the human Necromance and me.
I thought I'd grown past being hurt by that sort of thing. My mouth tipped up into the same faint half-smile I'd worn as a shield through so many bounties and apparitions as a Necromance. My cheek burned, the tat shifting under golden flesh, I wondered suddenly why my tat hadn't vanished like my other scars when I'd become hedaira. "I'll have a job for you too," I told Leander. "Just wait."
"Take your time." Amused and confident, his smile widened.
I grimaced, good-naturedly. He sounded like Jace.
The thought of Jace pinched hard deep in my chest, in a place I'd thought was numb.
Guess it isn't so numb, after all. If I took a slicboard and rose up into the traffic patterns, I would eventually see the huge soaring plasteel-and-stone pile that was St. Ignatius Hospital, where Gabriele had done what I could not and freed the empty clockwork mechanism of Jace's body from the illusion of life.
Leander's low laugh combined with the surf-roar of crowd noise-different from the Souk's genial roar and tainted with fatigue from the long transport haul. I'd slept between Paradisse and North New York, my head propped on Japhrimel's shoulder; the black dreamless nothingness I needed every two or three days. How odd was it that I could only sleep when he lulled me into it, when he was close?
I brought myself back into the present with a jolt. Stop wandering, Danny. Why are you getting so distracted? It's not like you. "First things first, though. Can you get us a cab?"
"All things should be so easy."
"You are truly a master," I called after him as he loped away to find and reserve us a hovercab in the queue that would be waiting outside along Beaumartin Street.
It was regular bounty-hunter banter meant to ease our nerves. When Japhrimel reached me, his fingers braceleted my left wrist. I controlled the nervous twitch-that was the hand holding my katana, as usual.
Did he think I was going to run now? Especially when he knew I would only go to Gabe's, a place he'd been before? "McKinley will search for information and find us accommodation." His voice cut through the crowd noise like a golden knife. "I thought that would please you."
There was no sign of the necklace I'd given him, and I had too much pride to ask what he'd done with it. Instead, I tried to pull my wrist out of his hand and got exactly nowhere, though his fingers were gentle. "There's no need for this. We should get going."
"I feel a need." His thumb stroked once across the underside of my wrist. Fire spilled up my arm again, I tugged harder. Achieved nothing. He might not be hurting me, but he wanted me to stay put. "This is unwise, Dante. I am not to be trifled with at this moment."
What the hell? Sekhmet sa'es, what the fuck are you talking about? "I'm not the one who's trifling," I hissed back. "You're the one who won't tell me a damn-"
"I will tell you something now," he said in my ear as if we weren't surrounded by a crowd of normals who shuffled toward a transport or away from one. Above us rose the vast dome of the transport well and the different levels of huge hovers docking like blunt whales at each level, the spine of the AI's relays bristling around each floor, failsafes and double-synaptics glowing and humming with electrical force and reactive-painted buffers.
I went still, closed my eyes. My shields shivered. "Fine." I would never have thought a demon could throw a tantrum. My rings popped, sparking, I wondered what the normals around us made of this. His aura covered mine, pulled close and comforting, but I felt the echo of his attention. He was doing it again, listening to a sound I couldn't hear, set at a harsh watchful awareness I couldn't imagine anyone keeping up for very long.
Why? I'm only here for Gabe, but Japh seems to think I'm in danger. Of course I'm in bloody danger, there are demons after me. Still-
"I never knew dissatisfaction before I met you, hedaira. The only time I feel any peace is when you are safe and I am near you. Be careful who you spend your smiles on, and be careful of what you make of me." Japhrimel paused. "I am seeking to be gentle, but frustration may make me savage."
In all the time I'd known him, he had never said anything even remotely like this. My throat went dry, my heart banging at my ribs and in my neck, the darkness behind my eyelids suddenly blood-warm. "You mean more savage than you already are?" I pulled against his hand again. I might as well have been chained to the dock.
"You have no idea of the depth of my possible savagery." It wasn't so much the content of his words as the way they were delivered, with a chill even tone I could have thought was indifference except for the well of sharp rage behind it. Japhrimel for the first time in my memory was furious, holding himself to control with an effort of will. "I tell you again, be careful. And again, I do not expect your forgiveness or understanding. I require only your cooperation, which I will get by any means I deem necessary. We are here to see what is so urgent with your Necromance friend, well and good. But do not taunt me."
Taunt you? "Taunt you? I'm not the one who keeps playing manipulative little games here, Japh. It's you and Lucifer who have the corner on that one. Let go of me."
Much to my surprise, he did. I almost stumbled, the release of tension against my arm was so quick. I opened my eyes, the world rushing back in to meet me, and lifted my left hand slightly. The katana's weight was reassuring. "We've got a cab to catch," I said over my shoulder. "Unless you're going somewhere else."
He didn't dignify that with a reply. It was probably just as well.
Gabe's house crouched on Trivisi
diro Street, behind high walls her great-great something-or-other had built. Her family had been cops and Necromances for a long time, passing along Talent and training in a haphazard way before the Awakening and the Parapsychic Act. They had survived because they were rich, and because they did everything possible to blend in before the Act made it possible for psions to come out of the shadows.
I deliberately did not look when we passed over the block that held a huge pile of stone with high holly hedges and walls. Aran Helm's house, where I'd begun to figure out just what nightmare had risen from the depths of Rigger Hall.
I didn't want to see if Helm's house still stood.
The first shock was that the neighborhood had changed. The winds of urban renewal had swept through what had once been a bad part of town, I saw several little boutiques and chic eateries as well as other restored homes.
The second shock, when we got out of the hovercab and Japhrimel paid the driver, was that the shields over Gabe's walls had changed. The hovercab lifted away with a whine, and my skin chilled again. I was really getting to hate hovers.
I caught Japhrimel's arm. He stilled, looking down at me. Leander stood on the corner, his eyes moving over the street and probably marking it in his memory; it was the same thing I did in an unfamiliar city. "Her shields are different," I said quietly, knowing I had Japh's full attention. "Look, can you and Leander wait for me?" He moved slightly, and I interrupted him before he began. "I give my word I won't go anywhere but into Gabe's house, I promise I'll come back out to you. I swear. But please, Japhrimel, this is private."
"You continually try to push the limits of-" he began and I squeezed his arm, sinking my fingers in. I couldn't hurt him, but just this once, I wanted to. I wished I could. My claws slid free, pricking into his coatsleeve, my entire hand cramping with the effort to stop them.
"Please, Japh." My voice gentled, it took an effort that would have made me sweat in my human days. Something suspiciously like tears pressed against the inside of my throat, so it came out muffled and choked instead of only soft. "Don't make me beg you over something like this." I can't stand begging you over something so simple. I can't stand begging you at all.
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