I struggled up to my feet, guns out, sweeping the clearing. The Trader was a twisting, jerking mass of flame and screaming. There was a sickening crunch; he fell like a dropped toy and lay in a burning heap. The bodies in the mass grave were writhing shadows, and the stench boiled out now that it was no longer laid under a shell of concealment. I scanned, trying to look everywhere at once, bracing for the attack. If a ’breed was going to hit me, they were going to do it now.
Nothing. The glare of hellfire stripped everything living of its substance, bleached the entire clearing and the bare branches on each trashwood bush. I waited, braced and ready, my pager going buzzwild again in my pocket. The bezoar had calmed down, just fluttering a little bit. It was like my coat was full of little animals, shivering away.
I exhaled sharply.
What the flying fuck?
This was a definite trap, but with no hellbreed lying in wait to kill me. So, the real problem was occurring elsewhere. And if Galina was trying this frantically to get hold of me…
First things first, Jill. Get that hellfire down, and check your cops for damage.
I got moving.
“I should kick your ass.” I glared at Rosenfeld, but there was no heat to it. I was too relieved. The pile of bodies behind me smoked and let out a vile reek, the sky was brightening, and a plume of thin, greasy black smoke was rising in the windless hush. Curses and hellfire, what next?
“You looked like you could use some backup.” Rosie glared back at me, her hands stuffed in the pockets of her leather jacket. She had wrinkled her nose exactly once at the smell. Beside her, Paloma held a snow-white handkerchief to his face. If it was an affectation, it was a useful one.
I could barely believe Rosie had agreed to Paloma. He was a mincing little martinet, and if he hadn’t been so good at teasing order out of the chaos of long-cold homicide cases he would probably have been “promoted” into jockeying a desk somewhere Monty and his ilk decided he wouldn’t do much harm. As it was, nobody wanted to partner up with the bastard, until Rosie had come back from her vacation ten pounds lighter and with those lines around her mouth, and stepped up to bat.
“Shoes,” Paloma said from behind his handkerchief. His small, dark little eyes were avid. “He had the wrong shoes. The bodies were wrong, too. Naked and charred. It had your name all over it.”
I nodded. Maybe he was trying to distract me from chewing Rosie a new one. If so, chivalry wasn’t dead. But it was far more likely he was looking to get brownie points instead, so I magnanimously ignored him. “Jesus Christ, Rosie. The backup I need is not to worry about some of you catching a severe case of dead from tangling with a bastard Trader.” I decided not to get bogged down in that. There was work to be done. “By the time you get Forensics out here the bodies will be cold; get them untangled. If we can identify any of them, I need to know yesterday.” I’d already pulled out the Trader’s wallet; I handed it over after glancing at the driver’s license and memorizing the name and address. “Find out everything you can about this guy too, but don’t go knocking on any doors. Just get me last-knowns. I’ll check his truck before I leave; but I want you to go over it with a fine-tooth comb. I don’t like the looks of this.”
Rosie’s jaw was set so hard it looked likely her teeth would shatter. She had to work to get them apart long enough to spit out two words. “What else?”
Jesus, Rosie. But I knew why she was angry. It had to do with a good cop’s grave, and the fact that she still blamed herself. Or me. Or both of us.
If I’d just kept better tabs on Carper… but I hadn’t. He’d brushed up against the nightside and paid the price, and I still hadn’t found the dirty cop who’d pulled the trigger on me outside Galina’s shop.
Goddammit, Jill, get back up on the horse. I scrubbed irritably at my forehead, dried blood and other gunk crackling as I worked it free. I’d pulled something in my leg, and it hurt enough that I shifted a little, easing it while the scar hummed wetly, pulling on etheric force. “Detail one of the black-and-whites to give me a ride. I’ve got to see what this was a distraction for.”
I had a sick feeling beginning right under my breastbone. But don’t assume is one of the first hunter laws for a reason. I didn’t have enough information to guess at the pattern yet.
Paloma let out a whistling little laugh. “Hell of a distraction. Can’t they just send you Christmas cards?”
My eyebrows shot up. If he cracked a few more like that I might actually get to like the prissy little bastard.
Rosie’s face eased, bit by bit. “Careful, Ricky. That was suspiciously like a joke you just cracked there.”
“Fuck you.” He turned his nose up—quite a trick with the hankie still clapped against his face—and stepped gingerly away. I noticed, bemused, that he wore wingtips too. His were spitshine-polished, glossy black numbers. Even his socks matched his trousers.
He dug in the pocket of his natty gray suit for a cell phone, and I winced at the thought of whoever was on call for Forensics tonight coming out and getting a load of this. They were just going to love it.
Rosie and I faced each other. There was a lump in my throat and too much work pressing down on me. I settled for clapping her gingerly on the upper arm as I brushed past. My coat flapped a little, a whole new collection of rips and gouges letting air through. “Good work, Rosenfeld. You’ve got a hell of a battlefield yell.”
“Thanks.” The compliment apparently gave her no joy. “I suppose I’d better get the psychs out here too to eval everyone. That guy…” She glanced at the still-steaming pile of charred bones that had been the Trader.
Some of the cops were going to have nightmares after seeing me violate the laws of physics, not to mention the Trader’s hellish snarl. The psych boys and girls were going to earn their cookies on this one.
“Yeah. Don’t let anyone go home without a session with the counselors. I mean it. Even you, Rosie.” Because I would hate to lose any more cops to the nightside. I really would.
You could never tell. A few people handled it just fine.
Others… not so much.
Her lip actually curled. “I don’t need a fucking evaluation, Kismet. I’ve got pills for that.”
And a patch of white in your hair you dye out every two weeks, not to mention some scars. You’ve seen the nightside and survived once. And she’d marched right down to my warehouse afterward to apologize for almost getting herself killed.
But sometimes it’s the ones who have seen it before that crumble, too. You just can’t ever tell. “Don’t get cocky, Rosie. Get your eval and eat something, will you? You’re losing your girlish figure.”
“Don’t you have some more property damage to commit, Kismet? Let me do my job here.” All her walls up, a scowl to match one of Monty’s best on her unpretty face, and she turned away. Paloma had jammed his phone shut and was issuing staccato orders; some of the blues were rolling their eyes. Rosie headed for the pile of charred flesh and stopped at its edge, looking down. Her shoulders were stiff, and her entire body closed in on itself like she wished she could disappear.
I let it go. My pager started buzzing again, and I told myself the prickling in my eyes was from the acrid smoke. The sun lifted above the rim of the earth, and I braced myself for a sleepless day.
12
The Parks & Rec truck reeked of cigarette smoke and the fading perfume of hellbreed, but held nothing out of the ordinary. Vinyl seats, papers scattered everywhere, a plastic coffee cup half-full of ice-cold coffee and the rest filled up with used Camels filters. I glanced through the glove box, checked under the seats, gave the tires and undercarriage an exam.
Except for some fresh scratches on the bed, where something square and goddamn heavy had done a number on the paint job, there was nothing.
For the moment I was going to work on the assumption that the truck was stolen. I made sure there was nothing in there likely to make it blow up and cost me another couple cops, scanned it for any etheric disturbance,
and decided to get out to Galina’s. Crosseye Garcia was tapped to give me a ride, and the entire way there he kept the scanner turned up to jet-takeoff level.
I guess I made him nervous. At least I kept the window down so he didn’t have to smell me.
Golden light was beginning to stretch and lick between buildings by the time we got to the right neighborhood. He let me off a few streets away from Galina’s, but before I got out I made sure he knew he wasn’t going home until he had a session with the headshrinkers. He cursed me roundly for that, and I replied with a grin and a slam of his cruiser door.
“Fucking freakshow,” he snarled before he gunned the engine and sped down the street, lights flashing.
I watched until he was out of sight, then disappeared into an alley, muscled up a fire escape, and cut across the rooftops. I circled Galina’s house warily, twice. An exhausted dawn hush clung to concrete, brick, siding, and pavement. The etheric protections on Galina’s shop reverberated uneasily, but they weren’t tolling like bells.
I sometimes wondered how hunters in other cities functioned without a Sanctuary around. Neutral supply of necessities to all the practitioners and quite a few of the nightsiders in a territory is the least of the services they provide. In Galina’s case, she was the closest to a confessor I’d ever have.
The Church doesn’t offer hunters Confession or Communion, because we traffic with Hell and commit the sin of murder every night. It was Galina who probably knew or guessed the most about me, with Mikhail dead. Saul didn’t ask—he knew everything he needed to. Perry? Don’t make me laugh—the more he thinks he knows, the less he actually does, and I want to keep it that way.
A chill finger touched my tired spine. You’re lying, Jill. He knows more than you think he does. You’re only a hairsbreadth ahead each time he plays one of his games with you.
A hairsbreadth was enough, wasn’t it? I wasn’t damned yet.
That was faint comfort indeed. And this was not a set of events guaranteed to make me feel better.
Ever since I’d gotten filled with plain lead right out in the middle of the street in front of the Sanctuary, I’d felt queasy coming in the front door. So this time, I dropped down soft as a cat from the neighboring rooftop, landing on hers. The greenhouse, its glass rapidly silvering as morning dew caught the dawn light, stood silent. Inside, green growing things breathed and dreamed.
The lock gave under my fingers and a tingle of sorcery. The color of the protections on the walls changed. I froze, and waited.
You do not drop in on a Sanctuary when she’s upset. You let her know you’re there, and you wait for her to let you in. Inside their thick walls, they have near-godlike powers.
I guess it makes up for being a tasty defenseless snack outside, kind of. But it would drive me utterly insane.
The protections calmed, flushing a dusky rose under a flood of mellow morning sunshine. I stepped inside, breathing in the smells of potting soil and fresh oxygen. My shoulders unhitched a little, before my pager buzzed again and cut off midway. Was that her calling again?
A long silver shape lay on a butcher-block table in the south quadrant of the greenhouse, placed for maximum exposure. It had been dead and black, a long time ago. Now the sunsword trembled eagerly against the table, its clawed crossguards chattering against the wood. The carved ruby at my throat woke up, warming, and the Talisman hummed a low, sustained note.
You can’t have a sunsword without a key, after all. The Eye had been the original key, and with it gone, the ruby Mikhail had given me functioned quite handily as a secondary. Wearing both of them while I was worked up was bound to make the sunsword edgy.
The empty place in its clawed pommel held a glimmer of crimson light before I exhaled sharply, my will flexing. The sunsword went back to sleep, I drew in a nice deep breath, and the trapdoor in the floor was thrown open from below, slamming into the chair used to prop it so hard the chair leapt back like a bee-stung dog.
Galina clambered up through the hole. Her marcel waves were disarranged, there were dark circles under her green eyes, and she was in her sleeping gear: boxers and a ragged blue Popfuzz T-shirt. Behind her, Hutch peered up through the trapdoor, his hair sticking up like a bird’s nest. He let out an undignified eep! and vanished.
“Jill.” Galina was breathless. The mark of the Order at her throat—the quartered circle surrounded by a serpent, a solid chunk of silver—glimmered. The walls resounded to her distress, and the morning light was very kind to her. “Jill, be very careful. Be very careful.”
I almost rocked back on my heels. Oh, Jesus. “I got your pages. What’s up?”
“I want you to be calm,” she continued, running right over the top of me. “I just want you to be calm. Calm down.”
“I’m perfectly calm.” I was beginning to get a hell of a bad feeling, but I was nice and chilly. “What the fuck?”
A familiar dark head rose up through the trapdoor. But it wasn’t Saul. It was Gilberto, and the instant he looked at me, his dead dark eyes flat and expressionless, I knew.
The world ground to a stop. I actually swayed.
“Oh, Jill.” Galina backed up two steps when I looked at her, fetching up against another table, this one holding empty pots and small shovels, twine, bamboo rods for bracing weak plants. Everything jumped, once, like a group of trained dogs twitching in unison. “It was right out in the street. We couldn’t—there was nothing—”
“Shut. Up.” It isn’t the sort of thing you say to a Sanctuary in her own home. But she stopped talking, high flags of color in her pale cheeks. My face felt strange, like it didn’t belong to me. Lying against my bones like a mask. “Gilberto?”
He finished climbing up, brushed his lean brown hands together as if ridding them of dust. Coppery highlights came out in his lank dark hair as he stepped into a bar of sunshine. “You takin’ me with you, bruja.” Flat and unironic. “We gonna have to burn some fuckers for this, es verdad.”
I didn’t want to ask. My traitorous mouth opened. The most banal thing possible came out. “I’m late. Has Saul finished breakfast?”
Because there was still time for God to see He’d made a mistake, and take it back. I should have known better. God doesn’t work that way.
He never has.
“Oh, Jill…” Galina’s hand clapped over her mouth.
“They took him,” Gilberto said. “They took el gato hombre, mi profesora. ’Breed and Traders. He put up a good fight. She”—he jerked his head at Galina, who grabbed the table as if it was driftwood and she was drowning—“knocked me ’cross the fuckin’ room, ay? I was gonna go out.”
Galina peeled her fingers away from her lips. “You would have gotten killed. Jill left you under my care. It was in the street; if he’d just been a little bit closer—”
Is he still alive? Not dead? “Galina.” I didn’t recognize my own voice. The trembling was in my arms, my legs. “Shut up. Please. Just for five seconds.”
She did. If there had been a clock, it would have ticked heavily in the thick silence. The scar burned against my wrist, and the sunsword chattered once more against the table. It was hard work to get it to stay still, with the Eye on my chest and the ruby at my throat spitting sparks. One, two. Little crackles of blue electricity.
Three. Four. Five. Then I counted again, because I still couldn’t put the words together. Finally, they came.
My throat was full of bitter ash. “Now.” I had to work to speak above a whisper. “We’re going to go downstairs. I need a new shirt and ammo. And grenades. And while you get those for me you are going to tell me everything.”
“I go with you.” Gilberto’s face settled into sallow stubbornness. “You hear me, bruja? I go with you.”
“Gilberto,” I said very softly, “do not fuck with me right now. Tell me everything you remember while I get a clean shirt.” I thought for a second. “And for God’s sake don’t get close to me.” It hurt to say it. The sunsword chattered again, and my hands were mak
ing fists and uncurling, completely independent of me. “I’m not safe.”
13
The Pontiac leapt forward, clearing the slight hill and going airborne. Landed with a jolt. This was not my usual intuition-tingling run through the streets, threading through traffic like a spaceship flying low. No, this was pure pedal to the metal, balls to the wall, get the hell out of my way, don’t care if I do hit someone. The engine thrummed, a subtle knocking I hadn’t been able to suss out yet in its high-level harmonics.
For the first time while driving this fast, I didn’t try to diagnose it. No, I just leaned forward, hands on the wheel, and willed the metal to go faster. Dawn was fully broken, morning everywhere bright as a hangover and full of knife-sharp shadows, the kind of solid black you only get very early on a clear morning in the winter desert.
Luckily every street I chose was pretty lonely at this hour, and the few black-and-whites that saw me knew my car. They don’t interfere when I go screaming through the streets, no matter what time of day or night it is. Sometimes, if I’ve called in, they even cut traffic for me. Not often—they can’t keep up.
Between the scene Rosenfeld and Paloma were still probably working and this, the betting pool was going to be a-chatter this morning. I hear they have a whole system for betting on when and where I’ll show up, how long before someone sees me, how many bodies at the last scene I visited. Macabre? Maybe.
But they know that when I disappear, it’s time to get nervous.
Gilberto had tried to insist on coming along. I’d ignored him, told Galina to keep him under wraps. I did not want my apprentice taken too. That would leave me with too many hellbreed to kill, and having to make a choice between my duty to him and the way my entire body burned at the thought of Saul in danger, in trouble, hurt…
I did not want to make that choice. I knew what I would choose, and it would damn me in the only place that mattered—my own conscience.
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