The caretaker had merely shuffled off with his shovel. I felt bad about not thanking him, but with an unconscious human woman shivering and moaning in my arms, her blood pressure and pulse dropping fast, my options had been limited. And he’d never shown up again when I chased an arkeus or two around the halls. If I wanted to see him, I had to go around the corner of the building and penetrate the maze that used to be a quad for the inmates to shuffle around.
And I did not want to see that imitation of a garden again unless I absolutely had to.
I set off up the driveway. Pebbles shifted and clicked as I walked, the edges of my aura like a storm front setting off waves of disturbance. It was like walking under a blanket of something a little less heavy than water. Setting each foot carefully, every inch of me quivering with alertness.
“Kisssssssssmet…” A faint, faraway giggle. “Kissssssmet, come closssser.”
You bet I could. But not in a way they would like. I kept my mouth shut.
The main building loomed up the hill, all its windows dead eyes. The bezoar twitched, and I stopped. Slid my hand into my pocket and made sure the knots were tight one more time. Before carefully, gently, drawing it out.
A soundless buzz almost made me jump. It was my pager, silent in its padded pocket, vibrating insistently. Not right now, dammit. I promptly shut the sensation out and yanked the bezoar back as it tried to squirt free of my fingers.
A sick green light flashed in one of the upper windows. Third floor, fifth from the left. Odd that it was up there, instead of in the basement—hellbreed usually like dark holes. The darker, the better. But the Hill’s basement is someplace not even a ’breed might want to be.
What the hell was a physical ’breed doing here? Arkeus don’t murder so directly; they usually gain substantiality a little at a time by stealing it from Traders. It’s a long process, and I usually kill them before they get halfway.
I leaned forward, each boot landing softly and rolling through, ready for any sudden movement.
None of the buildings were locked. There was no need, and in any case the locks went the same way the padlock on the front gate did. Boards were nailed up over random windows, as if the caretaker just came out and put a couple up for the hell of it every once in a while, a token show. It was like Band-Aids over leprosy.
As soon as the light flashed it was gone. My right hand curled around a gun butt as I stuffed the silk-wrapped lump back in my pocket. Seaweed-shifts of etheric interference blurred my smart eye, threatening to give me a headache.
That was the least of my problems. At least, if I couldn’t get a lock through this static on the disturbance in the ether a hellbreed represented, they couldn’t get a lock on me. Which meant I could come out of nowhere and knock them on their ass.
The steps were wide and oddly bleached. I went up them cautiously, eased across the wide porch, its columns cracked and dripping scabrous paint. A chorus of children’s voices, screaming, roared between them. Echoes bounced, ruffling my hair and bowing the world in concentric ripples.
The scar turned hot and hard as it pumped etheric energy through me. Now. Do it now.
I uncoiled from the porch, one boot thudding home on the left-hand door. Cold air closed over me—outside on the grounds it’s just cooler than normal. Inside, it’s frigid, and my breath turned to steam. I hit the ground, rolled, and was upright again in time to see the short ’breed hanging in the air over me, lit by the weird, faint illumination filling the entire building. My pager was going crazy in my pocket again, but I didn’t care, because I was in deep fucking shit.
It was the masked ’breed who does assassinations and dirty work all through Santa Luz. I say masked because he is, and “he” because it moves like a boy. The mask was a half veil, fluttering at the edges, and he wore loose-fitting black silk. He looked like a ninja in pajamas, complete with slippered tabi feet, except for the orange hellfire dripping from his black, black eyes. It crackled on his high cheekbones as it smeared, drops flying upward in merry defiance of gravity.
My arm jerked up, the gun spoke. Bullets spattered behind him as I tracked, rolling to the side. Henderson Hill rocked on its foundations, each silverjacketed round blowing a hole in the sweeping staircase’s wall and puffing out dust. He was fast, even for a ’breed. I’d never gone up against him, because he confined himself to killing his fellow hellspawn and Traders.
I like to encourage that sort of behavior. As long as it makes my job easier.
He hit where I had been lying bare fractions of a second ago. My left hand jerked the whip free, it struck like a snake and missed, flechettes jangling. The sparks—sterile orange from him, cold blue from me—were photo flashes etching shadows on the rotting walls and ceiling. I skipped back, footsteps grinding in dirt and trash against the scarred ancient linoleum of what used to be the reception foyer.
On all fours, the assassin snarled behind his veil. His breath didn’t paint the air with vapor. Mine swirled around my head like cigarette smoke.
Where plenty of them are tall packages of bad news, this ’breed is compact and skinny, almost childlike because of the weird proportion of the head to the limbs. White skin showed above the mask’s sheen, pallid and waxy like a maggot’s sides. Orange hellfire crawled and dripped, each droplet snapping out of existence as it rode the updraft of the hellspawn’s fury.
I shook the whip, calculated the ammo I had left in the gun, squeezed off a shot. He lunged aside, but it clipped him low on the left. Black ichor sprayed. It wasn’t a critical enough hit to put him down or slow him, but a few more like that and I’d send him back to Hell.
If I could stay alive long enough.
Still skipping back, the intake desk looming behind me under its drift of nameless, shapeless trash. Shadows spasmed and danced. Streaking with inhuman speed, he left a smear of fluorescent spangled hate behind him, each drop of hellbreed blood hissing as it hit turbulent air. I leapt, getting the high ground of the counter. It lurched under me like a living thing, rotting wood splintering, but I had my balance. The gun spoke again, its muzzle flash etching every line and angle for a brief instant as the whip cracked. My arm came down hard, leather singing as it stretched. My pager still buzzed, I ignored it.
Hit him now, hit him hard, goddamn you Jill, hit him—
The flechettes struck home, chiming, and the hellbreed howled. But he was so ungodly fast; he hit the desk and splinters smashed up in a wave. I was already airborne again, a tight-curled ball as my coat snapped once like wet laundry shaken before you put it on the line. Every muscle in my body straining against gravity, I twisted in midair and thumped down near the stairs, whirling and dropping to one knee, pointing the gun as the whip landed in a soft slithering coil…
… and the foyer was empty, from sagging walls to damaged ceiling. Thin curls of steam lifted from splattered hellbreed ichor, decaying rapidly. My ribs heaved; flickering with deep, harsh breaths that flashed into ice at the edges and fell in spatters of diamond frost. Dirty cheesecloth veils pressed close, tangling like wet weeds. The scar burned, throbbing, obscenely full.
Movement. The gun jerked, but it was just a twist of paper on a stray breath of air. The hellbreed’s footsteps retreated, faltering. I’d hit him but good. I didn’t have to chase him now—I knew who it was, and I could afford to go after him during the day when I’d have more of an edge.
I was beginning to think I’d need it.
I rose slowly. Could be a trick. What’s a ’breed doing here, though? Not an arkeus, either, a fully physical spawn. Intuition tingled as Henderson Hill breathed around me. A whole cavalcade of little sounds—an old building creaking and ticking as dawn approached, rustles and half-heard cries as the spirits crowded around me, drawn by violence—
—and the thump-shuffle of halting footsteps.
I crouched easily, the whip dropped, and my hands reloading my right-hand gun with the speed of long habit. The bezoar twitched spastically in my pocket and my pager just would not sto
p vibrating. I was about to pull the damn thing out and shoot it.
My bitten-down fingernails scraped in dust and cold grime as I felt for the whip handle, grabbed it. Shook it a little, testing. I did not rise—if something jumped me, I was a smaller target and better off having my balance, even if every fiber of my body was screaming at me to move. To face whatever was coming at me standing up.
That’s what training is for. To make sure you don’t do something stupid. At least, to help you not do something stupid. The fine hairs on my neck and back and arms stood up, quivering like sea anemones, searching for danger.
A shadow moved in the hall to my left. I had a split second to decide whether it was real, unreal, or a threat either way. The gun pointed itself, my finger tightened on the trigger. I kept breathing, smooth swells as my body recovered from the tendon-popping strain of superhuman speed. My shoulders were bridge cables, the need to move drawing down tighter and tighter inside me.
Darkness swirled. My shot went wide, blowing out the doorjamb above his head, and a mild blue, cataract-clouded gaze met mine.
The caretaker pursed his scarred lips. The lower half of his face was a runnel of broken and battered tissue, parts of his cheeks and jaw suppurating under a shield of startlingly white gauze. No matter how many times I see it, I still feel the urge to flinch.
I lowered the gun. Tried not to look like I was gasping for breath. Stared at him.
The caretaker is scarecrow-thin, in a gray coverall with a name embroidered on the left breast pocket. The embroidery is just a mass of snarled stitches now, and the coverall washed so many times it’s almost worn through at knees and elbows. Lines fan out from the corners of his eyes. His hair is indeterminate, somewhere between blond and dishwater. The only saving grace is those blue eyes, intelligent and mild even if they are filmed with gray. They looked at me, sad and wide, and I promptly mostly-dismissed him as a threat.
At least, he’d never been a threat before.
The masked ’breed was gone. Now I knew, or at least could assume with a degree of certainty, who had killed those girls. But Jesus Christ, if he was killing humans…
… something was very wrong here.
The idea that maybe it was related to Perry’s little present and dark hints was enough to break me out in a cold sweat.
I stayed crouched, every nerve alert and the scar humming as it sipped at the foulness in the air. The caretaker stopped, his hands hanging loose at his sides. A brief unease ran through me—not too long ago the circus had been in town and there had been a Trader with big paddlefish strangler’s hands.
That case is over, Jill. Deal with what you got in front of you.
Nothing. The world was creeping closer to dawn, and I had a lead. I could track down the masked ’breed without too much trouble, and find out why he was killing humans. After I found out what he was doing here at Henderson Hill.
I straightened, slowly, my knees creaking. The caretaker was staring at me. As soon as I was fully upright, he nodded and pointed up the stairs.
Behind me.
I threw myself down and aside, both guns slapped out now and the whip discarded. It hit the ground with a soft slithering just as I felt like an idiot.
There was nothing there.
He shuffled forward, his ruined face coming into view. There was now amusement sparkling in those filmed-but-piercing eyes. His breath turned into a cloud, just like mine.
“Jesus,” I said shakily. “Go ahead, laugh. I know you want to.”
The sound of a living voice echoed oddly. The crowding spirits flinched away. I got to my feet, shaking dust and sand out of my hair. The caretaker shrugged, spreading those long fingers. An odd kind of clarity lingered around him, none of the ghosts playing tricks or pressing close to probe for openings. He didn’t look like an exorcist. To my blue eye, he just looked… solid. And normal, but without the shifting fields of color that most often clung to living things.
Still, he breathed. And he was physical enough to hold a shovel. You learn to take what you can get on the nightside.
Again, he pointed at the stairs.
I holstered my guns, picked my whip up. “All right, all right. I’m going. I don’t suppose you’re coming with me.”
But I was surprised again. He edged past me, carefully, his back to the bullet-scarred wall. I’d done a fair bit of damage; the desk still quivered with the dregs of violence. There was a hall in the east building, second floor, that was probably still reverberating from my last visit here.
I didn’t like thinking about that. It was freezing in here, and even though temperature matters very little to a fully trained hunter this wasn’t a physical cold. It was far worse. A soft rustling scraped through the foyer. The chairs tumbled along the far side, swept there and jumbled together, creaked sharply once. Like a shot, or a leather strap cracking down on unprotected flesh.
I stepped back. I didn’t blame him for keeping his distance. He smiled very gently, his ruined mouth twisting against itself, and turned. He tested each step with a scarred work boot before committing his weight to it, and after he’d gone up four or five I moved to do the same.
The fifth floor had been a maximum-security ward. Some of the rooms were windowless, padding hanging in strangling, sticky scarves from the ceiling and walls. Others had bars and chicken wire holding glass that by some miracle hadn’t broken, or else crystalline shards held in by wire. My pager kept going off, frantic in its padded pocket like a small bird’s heartbeat. The bezoar twitched, too. My coat was beginning to feel like a live thing.
The caretaker kept to the middle of the hall, an exact distance away from either side. The heavy, reinforced doors occasionally twitched, each one ajar just a little.
Except for one most of the way down the hall. That one switched back and forth lazily, like a cat’s tail as it contemplates a mouse. Nasty little titters hovered around us, the spike tips of my aura glittering sharp and the clarity around the caretaker moving with him, a double sphere of normalcy. A soft chill breeze full of medical antiseptic touched my face, shuffled through my dirty hair.
I couldn’t wait to clean up. Soon enough.
I kept my right hand on a gun, and my left, deep in another pocket, tightened the knots on the silk. I had a visual on the ’breed I was going to be questioning about this, but it would be silly to let the bezoar out of my grasp. Galina would have something to lock it down further, and as long as I had it there was nowhere the masked ’breed could go to escape me.
Not like he could escape me anywhere in Santa Luz anyway. When I get a real hard-on for a ’breed they don’t stay hidden long. And it’s not like he blends in.
The caretaker paused. Half-turned, and I saw his profile as he laid a finger against his mutilated lips. The bandaging on the bottom part of his face still startlingly white, even if crusted with seepage, and I wondered, just like I did every time, just what exactly he was. There was no sick-sweet perfume of hellish corruption hanging on him, and none of the other classifications of nightside or nonhuman seemed to fit him. The only place in this whole heap that wouldn’t give someone the heebie-jeebies was his dark, dirty, normal boiler room, where he sat sucking on his bottle and staring at the walls.
I nodded and drew the gun. Kept it pointed at the floor, nice and easy. He set off again down the hall, and I found myself stepping only where he did. As if he was Mikhail and I was still an apprentice.
The Talisman sighed on my chest. No matter how much time goes by, missing someone never gets any better. You just learn to work around it.
The door’s twitching motion sped up, imperceptibly. The hallway rippled like a funhouse mirror, the floor rumbling as if we were above a subway.
He stepped wide of the door, carefully turning himself. Moved sideways, crablike, to give me room. Pointed, with one long pale finger.
I edged around the door, trying to stay away from it and not get too close to the opposite wall. The door stopped twitching. Now it just quivered a
little, jabbing out into the hall like an accusing finger.
Inside the room, the disturbance was so bad I had to shut my smart eye. For a moment the pictures didn’t make sense, then they snapped together behind my eyes and bile rose in my throat. I backed up a half step, instinctively retreating, and a hand closed around my upper arm.
I almost punched him. Jumpy, jumpy.
The caretaker shook his head, and those sad eyes stopped me. He pointed again, and his ruined mouth opened. I waited for him to speak for the first time ever, but he just gave me the saddest look imaginable, closed his lips tightly, and pointed inside the room again.
This time I steeled myself, and looked with both smart and dumb eye. My pager quit buzzing, blessedly.
A misshapen hunk sat in the middle of the gouged linoleum, dripping with corruption. It was veiled with a fall of black cloth, but it was almost certainly a chunk of a hangman’s tree. Various shapes squatted on its surface—a chalice of clotted scum, a claw from no creature that walked under the sun, other things whose intent was only to maim and harm. The altar wasn’t finished, but the atmosphere here was already so poisoned they probably wouldn’t need much. All it would take is the slightest push to gap the borders between here and somewhere else the smallest bit, and something could step through.
There were no vulnerable victims waiting in here, but the febrile boiling of agony, misery, hatred, and just plain nastiness here would be snack enough to feed something fresh out of Hell. There was no scoring on the walls, no drawn circle, and no parchment candles on wrought-iron pillars yet.
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