Saul tilted his head slightly. Glitter of eyes, the silver in his hair glinting. “It smelled bad. And I knew you’d come up here.” He avoided the headstone with respectful ease, striding around to the right, and stopped a couple feet away from me.
“Sorry.” I could have been apologizing for both things. “I, uh. Well. It got messy in there. I busted Perry up a bit.” I was suddenly aware of the rags of my T-shirt, rips in my leather pants, the reek of rotting corpse, the ick stiffening in my hair and the mess I’d left behind me just about everywhere tonight. Some days are like that. You just break everything as soon as you drag yourself up out of bed.
My trench coat fluttered. The wind was rising, and it was cold.
He bent and scooped up the bottle. It had landed on its bottom, fortunately. “What else did Perry say?”
“He hinted that a big-time ’breed was looking to come through.” Again, I added silently. Since I only narrowly slammed the door on him the last time. It wasn’t technically a lie, but the less Saul knew about that case the better. He worried enough as it was. “A ’breed with a big reason to hate any hunter of Jack Karma’s lineage.”
“Oh.” He touched the bottle’s open mouth to his lips, then handed it to me. A graceful gesture, like all Were movements. Polite, tactful, expressing everything. “Which is why you’re going to invent some reason to ask me to stay at Galina’s.”
My face froze into a mask. I didn’t think I was that obvious.
But who else knew me the way he did? “It crossed my mind,” I admitted. Then, because it was dark and we were at my teacher’s grave, because the Talisman throbbed like a sore tooth on my chest and I ached all over, especially with the heavy weight of the bezoar in my pocket, I told him the truth. “It would kill me to lose you, Saul.”
He turned his head. Clean, beautiful profile presented as he looked down at the city. “I’ve done all right so far.”
Damn touchy Weres. But at least he wasn’t assuming I didn’t need him around and clamming up. That was no good. “I’m not implying you can’t take care of yourself. I just… Jesus, Saul. Please.”
“Look.” He pointed, a swift gesture taking in the lights huddled in the valley, cuddled against the blackness of the river’s flow and the bulk of the looming mountains. The stars were hard, cold diamonds scattered over dirty velvet. “That’s Santa Luz.”
I know that. I lifted the bottle to my mouth, waited for him to make his point.
He waited a beat, as if he’d expected me to say something, then went on. “Every single innocent soul down in that valley is pulling on you from one direction. And I’m pulling from the other. How long is it going to be before we tear you in half?”
Is that what you think? That you’re on different sides? The vodka burned my mouth. I swallowed. Dried blood crackled on my skin. “You’re wrong. You both pull me in the same direction, Saul. The only thing pulling on the other side is… this. The things I’m trained to do. I commit murder every night. Several times, if everything’s hopping and the ’breed are uppity.” It was a night for uncomfortable truths. I would have expected us to be halfway to a screaming match by now. “Sometimes I wonder what makes me different from them.” It was my turn to wait before giving him the answer. “Then I realize it’s you.”
“Jill—”
I wanted to get it all out. “I’m scared, Saul. I can’t retire. This is the only thing I know how to do. The only thing I’m capable of. And if something happens to you, I am going to end up worse than the hellspawn. Because I won’t care.”
Silence, then, between us. I lifted the bottle, let a thin stream dip from it and plash on the headstone. None of us would get drunk—my helltainted metabolism ran too fast, and Weres burn through alcohol like it’s sugar.
And Mikhail? He wasn’t even here. It was just a stone I poured hooch on to make myself feel better.
Most of the time I was glad he was sleeping soundly. Because if he wasn’t I would have to make him. Then there were the other times, when I almost didn’t care.
I wanted him back.
Saul was very still, the charms in his hair glinting. “I wouldn’t take the Long Road without you, Jill.” Quietly, stubbornly. “Not even you could make me do that.”
Sometimes talking to him felt like a cardiac arrest, like my heart was literally stopping. Or just hurting. What do you do when you love someone so much your body does that? You can’t fight it, you can’t shoot it, you can’t do anything but let it happen. “I don’t want to push my luck.”
He stepped close. Paused. Stepped closer. His arm came over my shoulders, and the tension went out of me. I leaned into him, filth and dried blood making small crinkling sounds as my head dropped down. Silver chimed as charms hit each other, and I saw the red glow of the Talisman on my chest had muted to a glimmer. It faded as I leaned into him.
He let out a soft sigh. “It’s not luck. I chose this, and so did you. We made a decision. Even if you let go, kitten, I’m still holding on.”
A hot bubble rose up in my chest. It was a scream. I had to work to keep it locked down, swallowing several times. “Saul?” Again, the high, breathless voice. I sounded fifteen again. And scared.
“Shhh. Listen.”
I did. Heard nothing but the breeze in the trees, whispering over the well-watered grass. Traffic in the distance. My heartbeat, a song in my ears. Silver clinking a little as Saul moved, lifting his chin.
“I’ll go to Galina’s.” Quietly. His arm tightened around me.
Oh, thank God. “Thank—”
“Someone has to look after Gilberto. You’ve sent Hutch there too, I presume?”
I nodded. He could feel the movement against his shoulder. I reeked. He smelled of healthy cat Were, the dry-oily, slightly spicy tang of a brunet male. “Saul—”
“Don’t thank me, Jill. I’m doing this for your peace of mind. I’ll stay there for a day or so, but then I’m back on the job with you. It’s a compromise.”
Compromise, consensus, cooperation. It’s how Weres work. It’s also goddamn annoying. “You mean you’re just staying there long enough for it to get dangerous.”
“You see? A compromise.” He even, damn him, sounded amused. “So Perry’s hinting about a hellbreed coming through. What makes you believe him?”
“Besides the fact that he brought me a present?” I sounded as snide as Gilberto. “Nothing. He wants something, I’m going to hang back and make him work until I figure out exactly what’s going on.” The bezoar twitched in my pocket—another task to finish, before dawn if I could. “Then I’ll start shooting. This may be the game that ends up with me killing him.”
“Can’t happen too soon,” Saul murmured, and we were in wholehearted agreement on that score. “What are you doing tonight? Or this morning?”
The thing I wished I could say—having some quality time with my favorite Were—was tempting. It stuck in my throat like the lie it was, because I knew I was going to jump the gun and go hunting. “Tracking down a hellbreed who killed four student nurses over in Cruzada. When I’m done I’ll come by Galina’s. You can make me breakfast.”
“And Hutch. And Gilberto. And Galina. We’ll be a happy merry crowd.” His arm squeezed gently, half a hug. “Come soon, huh? I know, I know. As soon as you can.”
Another nod. “If I don’t track this ’breed down by dawn I’ll come by for breakfast. Promise.”
“Good.” He let go of me and stepped away. The wind touched where he used to be down the side of my body. A hunter doesn’t care about external temperatures, but I felt abruptly cold.
But he cupped my chin in his hand. Warm skin, a Were’s metabolism radiating heat. I leaned forward, he bent down, and our mouths met.
It should have been uncomfortable, kissing in front of Mikhail’s gravestone. I had the oddest sense that Misha wouldn’t mind. And then there was the hot, nasty feeling squirming under my breastbone for just a moment—look, here’s someone who wants me. Someone who hasn’t run off with
a Sorrow and ended up dead in a filthy hotel room.
It wasn’t fair. I didn’t know why Mikhail had done… what he’d done. I just wanted him back. And the sex, I understood now, had just been another way to tie us together. High pressure and availability instead of… what I had here and now in front of me, his fingers on my face and his purr thrumming through me, loosening my bones.
I didn’t want to let him go, my dirty fingers twining in his growing-out hair. But we both had to breathe more deeply after a bit, so we stood, foreheads together, my eyes closed. His purr, a Were’s response to a mate’s distress, settled into a subliminal pressure. Minutes ticked by.
It was no use. I had work to do. Even if I knew I was going out looking for a fight when I should be waiting for Hutch or Forensics to get back to me.
The vision of the last corpse’s face, screaming silently and forever under the glare of the dining-room light fixture, printed itself inside my eyelids. I didn’t flinch, but I did make a small sound. Immediately clamped my lips together.
I am about to do something stupid.
He let go of me, one finger at a time. Kissed my forehead, a gentle pressure of lips. Then he was gone, boots just touching the fresh, juicy grass. I listened as long as I could to the sound of his footsteps, light and graceful-quick. They shifted as he blurred into muscled, four-footed cougar form, still running faster than anything normal could.
Super-acute hellbreed-jacked hearing was good for something.
I found I was still clutching the bottle of Stoli. It made a thin musical sound as I upended it, washing Mikhail’s headstone. Alcohol fume wafted up, whisked away on a brisk breeze. The river’s inhale sped up as dawn approached. If I was going to find—and serve bloody, screaming vengeance on—the ’breed who had killed those girls, now was the time.
I won’t lie. I wanted to kill something else tonight. And it scared me even as I turned on my heel and vanished into the darkness.
9
The thinnest tendril of gray false dawn was touching the eastern horizon as I halted, the bezoar straining and writhing against blessed silk. I’d had to tighten the knots two or three times now. My apprentice-ring crackled with blue light, sparks under the surface of the metal occasionally breaking free with tiny snapping sounds, like itty-bitty razor teeth clicking together.
An iron gate stood ajar; the chain supposed to hold it broken and useless. They sometimes try to replace the padlock, but all it takes is dark falling for it to be burst into jagged metal shrapnel and the gate to drift open just a bit. Inviting.
The colorless, crumbling concrete wall is topped with razor wire. Behind it, the old Henderson Hill rises. The grass is long and always yellow now, clinging to life and sandy soil. Its buildings huddle together, spindly weeds forcing up through the cracks in the pavement squares and walkways. Several windows are broken, and no matter what time it is, it always seems a little darker the closer you get to the buildings. The wind makes odd sounds against every edge, even if no air is moving.
Sounds like faraway cries, or soft sobs. Or nasty, tittering laughter.
In 1927, construction on the new Henderson Hill was begun. It was almost finished when the great demonic outbreak of 1929 occurred.
That was too late for the inmates. They, like a lot of hunters we couldn’t afford to lose, died in the first wave of attacks. They don’t just call it Black Thursday because of the stock market, you know.
When some things come out of Hell, they come hungry. And the asylum, its physical structure impregnated with suffering from years of insanity and the torture that passed for treatment inside its walls, was a buffet.
The carnage here was blamed on a gas leak. Santa Luz’s hunter at the time, Emerson Sloane, was still trying desperately to get a handle on things when he was ambushed and went on to whatever afterlife he’d chosen. The city went without a hunter until Mikhail showed up, fresh from postwar Europe and trained by one of the best—the second Jack Karma. Mikhail brought peace of a sort to the streets—or at least forced a lot of the stuff still running around to keep a low profile. It would take a long time and more hunters to truly tame the nightside.
We are so few. The Church—and other churches—tries to make sure we’re funded and trained, and we have better firepower than ever, but even the best firepower is useless without someone capable of using it. I’d been at this for a while, and Gilberto was the only one out of plenty of candidates who even came close to measuring up.
Go figure. A murderous ex-gangbanger with a sarcasm habit and yours truly, the only help Santa Luz had against the nightside. Then there was Leon. I heard he’d been in the Army, in some South American country or something. And Anya Devi over the mountains, God alone knew where she came from.
No hunter likes to talk about what they were before.
I eased out of the shadows across the street from the gate. Psychic darkness swirled, coalesced between the posts. The bezoar twitched in my pocket, and my fingers made sure the knots were tight one more time.
The closer to dawn, the harder the fight. But any traces the ’breed who murdered those four girls had left would be fresh. That is, if they were smart enough to just leave, not stupid enough to stick around and wait for me.
Jill, you’re lying. You need another fight the way a junkie needs another fix. That’s why you’re doing this.
I tried to tell myself one reason didn’t cancel out the other. It didn’t matter. I knew I was lying.
It’s hard to look everywhere at once, especially when adrenaline is dumping into your bloodstream and nasty little flickering things are showing up in your peripheral vision. My blue eye turned hot and dry, untangling layer after layer of misery, agony, ill intent, cruelty—if ever a place deserved the name “haunted,” the old Henderson Hill did. It was so bad up here, the psychic soup so thick, that even a lot of the nightside stayed away. I’d chased a not-quite-physical arkeus or two up into those chilly-thick halls. But the more physical ’breed and nightsiders give this place a wide berth.
The nastiness in Henderson Hill can hurt them, too. It doesn’t care much who it hurts.
The gate let out a long moan as I approached. Nobody came down this part of Henderson Road, and there was a pocket of abandoned buildings washing up around the concrete walls. Before 1950, the entire complex had been loosely fenced; the public works department had put the walls up ostensibly to keep teenagers and hobos out. That was after the Carolyn Sparks incident, which you can find wildly varying descriptions of in the Noches County and Santa Luz Municipal library systems’ microfiche. What you won’t find is what really happened.
Trust me, you don’t want to know. Suffice to say the boyfriend Miss Sparks thought loved her so much turned out to be a Middle Way adept just looking for someone to use as a gate. He’d talked her into coming out to the old spooky Hill on a dare.
There’s no better gateway for some of the Abyssals than a gifted, untrained psychic, and the one who had come through… well, he ate Sparks’s boyfriend and settled down inside the psychic’s skin like a hand in a comfortable glove. It almost managed to raise another gate to bring a whole mess of its friends through. By almost, I mean it did for a split second, and released three more of them, before Mikhail could get out here to shut it down.
It took him a month to track all of them down. They went through civilians like a hot knife through butter. Misha never mentioned it directly. The notes he’d made in the file for the incident were gruesome enough.
The gate moaned even harder as I elbowed it. I knew better than to touch the metal with bare skin. Little sparks were visible all around me, the sea-urchin spikes of my aura crackling. There was enough ambient light for my hellbreed-jacked vision to have no trouble, but it was paired with a thick psychic darkness, a wet oppressive blanket almost blinding my smart eye’s capability to look between, beneath, around.
The scar puckered wetly, chilled as if someone had licked the ridged tissue and blown on it. A shiver of sick delight spilled
up the nerves of my right arm. Tasting the misery in the air, the scar pulsed as if it would swell.
I stepped over the threshold, Henderson Hill closing around me like a toothless, decaying mouth. The temperature dropped a good five degrees. A shiver passed through me, crown to soles, and my blue eye was suddenly alive with phantom images. Ghost faces, each one contorted in a rictus of terror or awful pleasure, swirled like smoke. Screams eddied soundlessly around me, moans and cries just at the edge of hearing. My skin was suddenly alive with little needling pinstrokes as insubstantial fingers brushed my shoulders, touched my hip, flinched away from the silver I carried.
It was getting bad up here. The spirits were almost visible, cheesecloth veils fluttering as the breeze veered. For an instant I smelled smoke, and the screams mounted, winding closer and closer. Etheric force crackled as I pushed outward, sweat springing up on my skin the way it never does unless I’m in a hard fight. Gravel scattered across the cracked driveway rattled like dry bones, pebbles lifting and dropping in place.
It’s always that way—the first few seconds are the time when most trips to Henderson go wrong. The world rippled around me, and normality reasserted itself. The shades retreated to the edges of my vision, flickering in the corners. The sounds drew back, too. Having an exorcist’s aura, hard and disciplined, is far from the worst ally when you’re stepping on ground that’s been unhallowed with a vengeance.
I let out a soft breath. Everything calmed down.
An untrained psychic might be drawn into the labyrinth of buildings and passages, deeper and deeper, until they ended up as a meal or one of the shades swirling around. Thank God most psychics, untrained or not, kept well away from this slice of real estate. Even normal people could get caught in the spider web of misery this place had become. Most of them had sense enough to stay clear.
The local exorcists called me instead of following if a victim headed for the Hill. There was a mute, scarred caretaker—the only person I’d ever seen here. He sat in the boiler room most of the time with a quart of rye, and I’d never figured out exactly what he was. Once, and only once, he’d appeared out of nowhere and walloped a writhing possession victim on the head with a shovel. The Possessor had been strong and wiry, using its victim’s body recklessly, and the caretaker’s appearance had given me a precious few seconds to get the vic down and mostly trussed up. The resultant quick and dirty exorcism had almost killed the victim, but I’d ripped the little bastard of a demon out and smashed it into screaming flinders.
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