Night Shift

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Get a hunter close to death, and she gets the jumping jitters. No place for all that adrenaline to go except sawing along the nerves.

  The coat dripped thick red and thin rotting blackness on the floor. I had to hose it off and dispose of it, and transfer everything into the pockets of a new black leather trench. But I just stood there, shaking.

  I could have died. If it wasn't for the Were I would have died. The 'breed had me hooked neat as a trout. He could have just reeled me in and. . .

  The trembling refused to go away. From scalp to heels, the animal side of my body was taking revenge. It knew how close it had come to death, and wasn't fooled by my continued breathing and heartbeat. Mikhail called this part the "rabbit shaking in a hole" and had some long involved Russian prayer he would use whenever things had gotten dicey and we'd pulled through once more.

  Me, I just shivered. And shivered some more.

  I put the coat up on its rack, forcing myself to move. My laundry room was painted yellow, a nice sunshiny color.

  The sunsword was back at Galina's, in her greenhouse for charging all day tomorrow under the near-desert sun.

  She hadn't said anything, but her eyes had gotten big, and she'd taken the sword without comment.

  I hadn't stayed in her shop long. Maybe I was afraid of what might happen next, for Chrissake. I was done. Stick a fork in me.

  The floor in here was tiled, so I hooked up the hose and sluiced the tiles as well as my coat. By the time the water turned clear and went down the drain at the far end, I was jittering so bad my hands almost blurred.

  I made it out into the living room, crossed it in long strides, and swung into the kitchen. The floor was cold under my bare feet. I reached up on tiptoes and got the bottle of Scotch down. I had to grab for it a second time, and catch it when I knocked it off the shelf, actually.

  "Steak. And onions. I'm not sure if you like them, but no steak is complete without. You need protein." Saul sounded amazingly calm. "And salad, I think. We don't have fresh bread, so it'll have to be store-bought wheat with butter. Sorry about that."

  I twisted the cap off the bottle. Eyed the glasses on the shelf underneath the liquor.

  Fuck that.

  I took a long pull straight from the bottle itself. Most alcohol just goes straight through me—my metabolism runs so high now. It was a goddamn shame, because getting drunk seemed like a fabulous idea.

  The bottle fell away from my lips. I had to breathe. Then I lifted it and poured a little more down. It burned all the way, and I could finally admit what was bothering me.

  Oh, Jill, my pretty little Jillian, do you have any idea what you are going to owe me when this is all over?

  The trouble was I did have an idea, and a good one. Negotiating with Navoshtay fell under the amorphous heading of "other services" that were covered in the bargain I'd made with Perry—at a price of a few more hours of my time. It wasn't going to be pleasant, especially if he decided to fiddle painfully or otherwise with the scar again.

  Or if he decided he wanted my blood to flow instead of his. It was always a possibility.

  I'm more worried about Perry than I am about the other hellbreed, and that's not right He's wormed his way into my head, dammit "Jesus," I whispered, and took another long pull.

  Saul's hand closed around the bottle, pushing it away from my lips. "Easy there, hunter." He said it softly, almost kindly. "Easy."

  Words I could never say boiled up in my throat, hit the stone sitting there, and died. Easy? What's fucking easy about this? It's not going to be easy paying Perry what I owe. It's not going to be easy dealing with Navoshtay in my town. And it isn't going to be easy to get my hands to stay still and my brain to stop running in circles.

  I searched for something to say to get him away from me. To run him out of the house, if possible, or just get him to shut up and leave me alone to deal with this in my own way. My gaze snapped up to his. "There is nothing easy about this," I rasped. "Fuck off."

  He overrode me, sliding the bottle's hard glass from my fingers. Something sizzled on the stove, but he paid no attention. He set the bottle down on the counter with a slight click, then did something very odd.

  The Were took my face in his hands, his palms warm against my cheeks, and stared down at me. His gaze was dark, not the black pit of a hellbreed's but a human darkness, for all the unblinking patience of a cat lived behind it.

  I saw something pass through his eyes, a long low shape like a hunting animal, muscularly padding through sun and shade.

  He didn't flinch back from my eyes. Most people find my gaze hard to meet because of the mismatch; it disturbs them on a deep nonverbal level.

  The first time I'd opened my eyes after coming up out of Hell, I'd seen Mikhail bending over me, the bloody gem used to anchor me clasped in his fist and his mouth drawn tight under his hawk nose.

  So, he'd said, quietly. You come back with gift, milaya. Come, let us get you in bath.

  The sob startled me. I caught it behind my teeth, swallowed it. Smelled the musk of a male Were and the smell of food, mixing together. Good smells, both of them, and a heady pairing.

  Saul's thumb stroked my right cheekbone. "Let it out." He crooned in the particular way Weres have of soothing an injured one of their own, a deep rumbling that shakes the bones loose and the muscles into jelly. "Just let it out, Jill. Let it go away."

  He said it so kindly, and he didn't look away. He stared right into my eyes as if they didn't bother him a bit, as if they were normal and natural. Then he leaned down, his eyes not closing, and his mouth brushed mine.

  I leapt guiltily, almost knocking foreheads with him, but his fingers tightened and I stilled, letting him touch my lips with his. As soon as I stopped struggling, one of his hands curled warm around my nape, and my mouth opened to his.

  I had not been this close to anyone in so long. Not since Mikhail.

  The smell of musk and male filled my nose, heat sliding down to detonate in my belly, my eyes fluttering closed as my fingers came up and wrapped in his hair. He pressed forward, his hands sliding down to flatten on my back, and I found myself with my back to the counters, balancing on one leg because I'd ended up wrapping the other one around him, his mouth open and greedy but curiously polite, as if he didn't want to press the kiss any further than I wanted.

  As if he was asking me. He tasted like moonlight and the taint of whiskey passed from my tongue to his, came back laden with another, newer taste—the one we made together, a mixture of my own breath and someone else's.

  My head tipped back. His mouth traveled down past my jawline, onto the curve of my throat, and hovered over my pulse. The low rumbling growl he gave out chattered the bottle against the counter and made the wood groan. The scar had turned hot and tight on my wrist under cold copper, and I realized I was naked under the T-shirt and his hands had roamed, and that I could feel the harsh material of his jeans against the inside of my thigh.

  I turned into a statue. My breath stilled, stopped, and I waited for the violence to explode. I waited for pain, for the sharp strike of a hand against my cheek, for him to shove me to the floor, a kick catching me under the ribs with a sound like red fury. Red and yellow shapes tangled behind my eyelids, squeezed shut tight enough to ache.

  Even with Mikhail I had sometimes frozen, despite his gentleness.

  Saul froze too, a curious stillness, his warm hands flattened against my back and his face in my throat. I felt the hard prickle of a tooth through his lips, he'd paused right over my jugular.

  Of course. That would be the most sensitive, most highly charged spot for a Were. The trust implied in letting his teeth near my throat was tremendous.

  My fingers had turned to wood in the silky pelt of his hair.

  My breath held itself as long as it could. He didn't move.

  When I finally let the air free of my lungs with a small wounded sound, he stirred. Set me gently back on my feet, his arms still around me and my cheek pressed against hi
s chest. The rumbling intensified, shaking through the channels of my veins, loosening my muscles, and calming the frantic racing inside my head. It felt safe to rest there, leaning against him, a safety I could never remember feeling anywhere else.

  A safety I found I liked a little too much.

  Cancel that. A whole lot too much. He was just a country-boy Were full of disdain and thinking he knew everything, looking down his nose at me for making a bargain that allowed me to fight better. If he wasn't an enemy, neither was he a friend.

  Then why was he holding me? Why had he spent all day bumping into me, herding me around?

  He'd saved me with my own knife.

  Coherent thought returned. What the fuck just happened? My heart pounded against my ribs like an overcharged motor. Jesus Christy what the fuck is this? Weres don't… they never… I…

  I couldn't even finish a sentence inside my own head.

  His arms tightened briefly, squeezing my breath out. "You go change," he said finally, as if it was a foregone conclusion that I would. "I'll finish dinner. You need some ballast in you." He let go of me, after taking one last long inhale in the vicinity of my hair.

  Smelling me. Taking me deep in his lungs, marking me in his memory. Weres did that while tracking, I knew. It was an oddly intimate thing, and I wondered what it meant.

  I dredged real deep for something smart to say. I settled for spluttering. "What the fuck—"

  "Jill." He gave me one dark look, shaking his hair down over his eyes and glaring. "Go get changed. I'm making you dinner."

  Stubborn endurance has always been enough for me—too much, sometimes. But this time my courage failed me. I fled the kitchen and headed for my bedroom, and by the time I got there the phone on my nightstand was shrilling.

  I scooped it up. Please don't let it be Perry. "Yeah?"

  "Kismet?" An unfamiliar male voice. "It's Clarke, from New York. You set us to do some digging about a disappeared 'breed named Cenci? Real blonde, lots of trouble?"

  Relief curled inside me, hot and deep. It wasn't Perry. Of course, it could be bad news in its own right.

  That's the trouble with being a hunter. Some days, it knocks the optimism right out of you.

  "Yeah." I cleared my throat, repeated it. "Yeah, I did. Do you have anything, anything at all?"

  "You won't believe this." Click of a lighter and a long inhale; Jonathan Clarke was a smoker despite being a hunter. You don't live long in this line of work without some kind of stress-reduction vice, I guess. "Her name's Cenci all right, but that's only half of it. Guess who her daddy is."

  I just got almost killed and kissed by a Were. I think my threshold of disbelief is a lot lower than I started out tonight with. "I give up. Who?"

  "Navoshtay Niv Arkady. Old Ark-and-Bark himself. There's more."

  He's her father? The strength ran out of my legs. I sat down hard on the bed, the mattress squeaking faintly. Saul had made the bed, neatly, and I felt a moment's guilt at screwing up the pristine blankets.

  This just keeps getting better. "Take it from the top, Jon. I'm listening."

  Harp called in as I was scraping the last bit of grilled onions up from my plate. I snagged the phone with one hand, licking the fingers of my other hand clean and reaching down to yank at my boots. "Jill here."

  "Jill, it's Harp. Glad you're home. Listen, I—"

  "Clarke from New York called. I have an earful for you." Boy, do I ever.

  "Save it to tell me in person. You and Saul need to hightail it down here. We've found what we think is the main nest."

  My pulse quickened, my breathing shallowing out. Saul took the empty plate from my hand with a nod. He'd been quiet all through dinner, neither of us meeting the other's eyes, the only sounds the scrape of forks and knives.

  The fact that his cooking was good even for a Were was merely incidental. Just like the fact that I was a lot less shaky once I had some ballast in me.

  "Where are you?" I must have sounded different, because the Were's eyebrows shot up, and he cocked his head. I saw this in my peripheral vision, unwilling to look directly at him.

  She gave me the address—a house down on the south border of Ridgefield, the edge of my territory. "We're keeping the press off, but that won't last long. When can you be here?"

  I did a few rapid mental calculations. It was a thirty-minute drive. "I'll be there in fifteen. Is Monty there? Get the ranking officer to tell the traffic detail I'm going to break a few laws and to get someone to cut traffic for me. How many bodies do we have?"

  "Four for sure, but I'm not certain about anything else. There's sorcery here, Jill. I hope like hell you have some good news."

  Sorcery meant something they needed a hunter to look at, something possibly deadly. I finished pulling my boots on. "News, yes. Good, no. See you soon." I smacked the phone down so hard I was faintly surprised the plastic didn't crack, and looked up to find Saul's eyes on me.

  There was no time for talking about anything other than the current crisis. I am such a coward I was actually relieved, "Saddle up, furboy. Let's roll."

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Impala's engine cut off, its full-throated purr ceasing and the ticking of cooling metal taking its place. Saul managed to work his fingers free of the dashboard, and gave me a look qualifying as sardonic. "You're a menace,"

  he said flatly, but I was already unbuckling myself. The windows were down all the way, and the sudden cessation of wind-roar was shocking.

  "What, you don't like riding with girls in cars? I thought out on the Rez that was the main form of entertainment."

  And having a touch of precognitive ability does help in traffic, you know. I opened my door and stepped out into a predawn hush full of grayness. Prickling filled the air. We would have an autumn thunderstorm before long, the heat was already becoming close and dense.

  "Riding I like. Committing suicide by automobile I don't." He actually did seem a little green, and that cheered me up immensely. He fell into step behind me.

  The street was quiet and residential, with a few lush greenbelts taking advantage of the river's proximity. I habitually calculated angles of cover as we walked toward the flashing reds and blues, yellow crime-scene tape fluttering as they roped off the entire yard. Forensics was out in force, and I saw three white coroner's vans.

  Christ. The banter wasn't easing my nerves. "You're still alive, aren't you? I hope you didn't leave fingermarks in my dash."

  He was again way too close to me, almost bumping me as we walked along, perfectly coordinating his steps with mine. "Next time, I drive."

  I don't think so. "Dream on. Nobody drives my baby but me."

  "Your baby?" Again, that faint tone of grudging admiration.

  I ran my tongue along the inside of my teeth, wishing my cheeks weren't flush-hot. What was the matter with me?

  What was the matter with him?

  "I rebuilt her," I said shortly. "I drive her."

  "You rebuilt her?"

  I stopped and rounded on him, my second spare leather trench coat swirling. He stopped as well, with perfect balance, not running into me or even stumbling. The stormlight was good to his face, and silver winked in one of his braids. I took a closer look—it was the twisted remains of the silver bracelet from Galina's, tied into his hair like the charms tied into mine with red thread.

  Nameless fury worked up inside of me. I throttled it, kept my voice steady and even. "Look. I don't know what game you're playing, but it stops here. I've got a job to do, and the less I'm distracted the less people will die. I want this goddamn rogue and this goddamn hellbreed off my streets, and safely dead if at all possible. Whatever you're doing, quit I don't have time for it."

  He studied me for a few seconds, his eyes humanly depthless. Not like a hellbreed's at all. "I'm not playing a game."

  Then what the hell just happened? Or is that some arcane Were protocol I don't know about? I don't hunt your kind, I don't know all their ins and outs. "Whatever it is,
stop." I figured that covered about everything. "I have enough to deal with."

  "I'm here to help." Was that a scowl? He looked away, at the plain two-story frame house being swarmed by Santa Luz's finest. "There's Harp."

  Just like a goddamn Were, looking away and changing the subject. "Fine. Just stay off my back."

  "Huh." It wasn't affirmative or negative, just a sound.

  Goddamn Weres and their goddamn noncommittal noises.

  I wished the heat in my cheeks would go away, took a deep breath and looked up to find Harp standing, fists on hips, on the porch. She looked tense and furious, the feathers in her braids fluttering and her jaw set.

  Great. I ducked under the yellow tape, nodding at the uniform on duty—it was Willie the Mouse, who flinched when his eyes hit mine, his left hand coming up to touch his right shoulder. A Trader had taken a chunk out of him once, before I could get there and put it down in a welter of blood and screaming, not to mention the stink of roasted flesh because the apartment complex had been burning down around us.

  So many of my memories are tinged with smoke.

  And blood.

  I dropped my eyes as Saul ducked under the yellow tape behind me. "He's with me, Willie." I pitched my voice low and soothing. "How's the shoulder?"

  Mikhail had once rescued him from two Traders and an arkeus. That was before my time. Poor unlucky Willie.

  "Still hurts sometimes, Jill. Thanks." He didn't sound thankful—he sounded like he'd prefer I didn't talk to him at all.

  He'd needed a solid two years of therapy before he stopped waking up screaming, I'd heard. The chasm between us yawned wide.

  But at least he was still alive. That was worth something, wasn't it?

  A knot of forensic techs swarmed around a particular spot in the dry grass of the yard. I saw Foster's sleek ponytailed head; he nodded and pointed up at Harp, a quick sketch of a movement.