Angel Town

by Lilith Saintcrow

  “Well, fuck. Come on.” It looked like whatever case had shot me in the head and left me out in the desert wasn’t over. I half-turned, glanced at the deserted street. Something was troubling my city. Of course the legions of Hell flood in when a hunter goes missing. We’re barely enough to stem the tide as it is.

  But this was exceptional. And when the exceptional shows up, a hunter gets nervous.

  Saul had gone still, looking the same direction I was, the empty wrapper closed in his fist. I headed for the knot of cops, my trench flapping a little and Eva drifting reluctantly in my wake.

  “It’s about goddamn time,” Montaigne greeted me. He coughed, and it had a deep rasp to it I didn’t like. “Where have you been?”

  “Dead, Monty. You want to keep asking questions like that, or you want to tell me what you’ve got?”

  “Hi, Jill.” Badge folded her ample arms over her equally ample bosom. She blinked, as if dazed. “You look like shit.”

  “Thanks.” I glanced at Sullivan, who visibly flinched. It wasn’t like him. Of course, he would probably have been an accountant if he wasn’t a cop; he had a feel for the nitpicky detail and he liked things neat. That was his trouble—he liked everything all explained. “Vanner?”

  “He’s…” It was Badge’s turn to glance around uncomfortably. Neither of the guys gave her a hand. “He’s changed, Jill. He’s scrambling around on all fours, but it’s definitely him. Fast, too. Guerrero here says we’re not supposed to get any closer to the old Hill.”

  “Yeah, that’s a good idea. You know the drill.” Everything clicked into place. This situation, at least, I knew how to handle. “Relax, boys and girls. Kismet’s on the job.”

  “Thank fucking God.” Monty muttered. “I suppose you need another pager, too.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt. But I’ll be with Devi, just buzz her for the time being.”

  He hunched his wide shoulders. “Fine. Jesus H. Menace to property.”

  Well, that was good. If Monty was bitching about property, he was relatively okay.

  “I haven’t blown anything up yet today, Montaigne. Give it a rest.” But you should’ve seen me the other night. I busted up the Monde but good. Another chill walked up my back. The gem rang softly, like a crystal wineglass stroked by a delicate, damp fingertip.

  Devi was staring down the street as well. She’d gone completely still. “Jill?”

  “Let’s roll. Go home, everyone. Good work.”

  “I suppose I can’t tell you to be gentle,” Badger called after us.

  She probably had to say it. She is, after all, a mother.

  * * *

  The county put up a concrete wall around the old Hill after the Carolyn Sparks episode. Which was a reasonable response, given that that had involved a Major Abyssal, an untrained psychic, and a string of murders that made even a seasoned hunter blanch. I’ve seen the file—even with only black-and-white photos it’s enough to give you nightmares.

  Someone even occasionally tries to put a fresh padlock on the front gate. Come nightfall, however, the padlock is always busted wide open, shrapnel scattered in a wide arc, and the iron gates stand open just a little.

  Inviting.

  The gravel drive inside the gate was moving. Little bits of it popped up and turned over with an insectile clicking, as if the whole expanse thought it was popcorn while it’s still just bursting sporadically. Before the big explosion.

  I cocked my head and stared, one hand loosely on a knife hilt. It was, I suppose, a hunter’s equivalent of a nervous tic. “Jesus,” I breathed.

  Anya laughed, a jagged, brittle sound. The gravel settled down, little gray stones twitching in the sunlight. “Thank God dusk is a ways off.”

  “Look.” Saul pointed. Scuff marks on the scattered ground, and smears of something on the gate itself. My eyes narrowed, and I didn’t need to get any closer to tell that the stains were fresh, and crimson.

  Anya and I both drew our right-hand guns, a weirdly synchronized motion. We could’ve been on the stage.

  “Take point.” Anya indicated the gates. “I’ll follow in three. Were?”

  “I’m a tracker.” Saul crouched fluidly, the fringe on his suede jacket fluttering. It almost hurt me to see how it hung on him; he was so thin. “I’ll be fine. This is just like spot-jumping scurfholes on the Rez.”

  I blew out a short breath. “Okay. Give me three, Anya, then come in. Give her three, Saul, then you come in. If something’s going to go wrong, it’ll go in the first few seconds. Christ, I’ve never seen it so bad here.”

  “You sure about that?” But Devi, tight-lipped, just shook her bead-weighted hair with a heavy chiming when I glanced over. “We’re burning daylight. Do it.”

  Still, I took another few precious seconds to study the gates. Wrought iron, quivering just slightly, and the gravel moving uneasily behind them. It shouldn’t have been this bad.

  Something happened here. Something fed the Hill. Shit. Inhale, exhale, watching the gates with their seaweed drifting, just a little bit too quickly to be the wind moving them, just a little too slow to be anything else.

  Some hunters say it’s not the big weird that wallops you the hardest. It’s the just-slightly-off, the subtly wrong. Because it echoes inside your head and builds until you want to scream. I’ve lost civilians to both. Some people crack just seeing a body-modded Trader. Some go screamingly, eye-clawingly, gratefully insane when faced with something that breaks all their base-level assumptions about how the world works.

  Still others take the whole enchilada, seem okay, then walk home and ventilate themselves.

  You just can’t ever tell. You can only visit the grave afterward and feel the horrific tightness in your chest that means you didn’t do a good enough job protecting them.

  Personally I think both the big and the little weird are hideous, and depending on when they hit, they can take the legs right out from under a normal person. Even a hunter gets a chill now and again. We’re trained, and we’re ready, but nobody is ever really ready for the weird all the time.

  At least a hunter has an explanation, and a job to do.

  The gates clanged wide, my boots hitting them squarely, and I landed on popping, pinging gravel. Little chunks of stone rose, whirling, and my aura fluoresced into the visible, hard little sea-urchin spikes tipped with points of light. That shell flexed, a sphere of normalcy asserting itself, and a tide of whisper-screams rose around me. My hair lifted on a not-quite breeze, and my left eye turned dry and itchy, untangling tricks of perception and snarled etheric strings. The lines quivered, and I could almost-See the passage of something else through here recently. More spots and spatters of blood. Someone was moving fast.

  Well, at least we had a trail. And for a hunter, blood’s as good as neon arrows.

  The buffeting increased, but I had my feet planted, and the gem gave another high clear hard ringing all through my bones. I pushed, bearing down as if I was ripping a Possessor out of a hapless victim inch by inch.

  Most often, they code and you have to jump-start their hearts and get them to a hospital. It’s a tremendous psychic shock—all your mental cupboards torn open, furniture hacked apart, windows smashed, the Possessor digging in with its little claws, woven into mental architecture over weeks or months of dedicated pawing and fingering.

  Pushing, pressure mounting behind my eyes, hearing the snap of a leather coat as Devi landed, the Hill rousing itself like a sleepy beast. An almost-physical click as the compression vanished, it was work not to stagger. My left hand was a fist, cramping, I shook my fingers out.

  Saul was beside me, stamping his right leg twice. It was like striking a drum, and the driveway shuddered before it settled. His eyes were lambent even under the assault of sunshine, and as he straightened it was suddenly easier to breathe.

  Anya’s bindi flashed, the beads in her hair rattling, and it was a relief to see the same speckled sea-urchin shape to her aura. She opened her eyes cautiously, and took a
step forward. The gravel was still in a perfect circle around her booted feet, just as Saul and I carried an area of eerie stillness with us. Outside those calm patches, the gravel popped up, flinging itself about knee-high.

  We waited.

  The Hill calmed slightly. It was rumbling and unhappy, quivering on the edge of sentience. Before, it would have been cold and tricky during the day, active and dangerous at night.

  Now, even under the sun, it felt treacherous. And the cold was not physical. It lay under the daylight with its own heavy weight, a prickling like tiny feet wandering all over me, probing delicately into every cavity, tickling every inch.

  I shuddered, threw the thought aside, and a buzzing rose momentarily inside my skull.

  Oh, you tricky bastard. No, thank you. Another flex, sweat popping out along the curve of my lower back. Even with a hunter’s regulation of body temperature, a few things will make you damp up.

  Sorcerous effort. Combat. Sex.

  Terror.

  The black hole inside my head yawned, and for one vertiginous second I was skating its edge as the walls between me and however I had ended up in a shallow grave crumbled.

  Oh, Jill, you are fucked for sure. A soft, merry voice, my own, inside the dark reaches of my skull. Fucked six ways from Sunday and hung upside down, too. This was where it happened.

  Where what happened, though? I returned to myself with a jolt. Saul’s hand over my shoulder, claws needle-poking through the tough leather, just felt, not breaking the borrowed skin. His mouth was close to my ear, warm breath on my skin, and for a bare moment a tide of hot feeling rushed through me, too complex to unravel before my sightless eyes blinked and started relaying information to my busy little brain again.

  “Kismet?” Devi, thinly controlled.

  “Steady.” The gun was pointed down and to the side, thank God. “Steady as a rock, babe.”

  “Doubt it.” But she set off, soundless over the gravel, with a sliding, rolling, hipwise step. “Follow the yellow brick road, children.”

  “Ding-dong, the bitch is dead,” I muttered. Only, if the bitch was dead, that bitch was me. Under the dirt with my socks rolled up.

  Great. Now was a bad time to be thinking those sorts of things.

  Anya laughed again, but softly, lighting with a feral intensity that turned her into a very pretty woman indeed, blue eyes firing and her mouth turning up. Hides her light under a bushel, her teacher had remarked to Mikhail, back when we were apprentices. The sort of girl who would wallflower at a party until you actually spoke to her and realized what a sharp mind was behind that pleasant face.

  She led along the trail and I swept next, Saul behind and slightly to my left. It was like moving after Mikhail, stepping only where he did, breathing only as he did. You can’t get closer to another human being than when they’re trusting you to do your job and watch their back. Anticipating, guessing, responding to every breath of chill intent against the skin, taking over the angles like clockwork so each is covered, gaze moving in smooth arcs, the little hitch in Anya’s breathing when the gravel began to pop like shrimp in a sauté pan. It evened out immediately, and I thought our hearts were probably matching beat for beat, too.

  She was heading for the main steps, and I wondered if the air inside was still reverberating from my last visit here—or at least the last visit I remembered. If the front desk was still smashed, if there was still violence in the air—and if there was a room upstairs where I’d taken apart a hellbreed-built altar, bile burning my throat and the banefire whispering and aching to escape my control.

  And the scar on your arm aching as it tried to burrow in toward the bone, Jill. Don’t forget that. Another soft, sliding, nasty little voice. The little scar Perry gave you. The mark of Cain.

  Cain shot his brother, though. I just shot my pimp. And oh, Christ, I did not want to go back to that night, to the hole in Val’s forehead and the ticking of the clock on the wall. The ticking that would turn into a buzz as tiny feet crawled over my rotting flesh.

  “Stop.” My voice cut the thick, cloying silence. “Devi. The windows.”

  She glanced up. “What?”

  Someone—probably the caretaker who lived in the boiler room, with his filmed gaze, scarred face, and his quart of rye—sometimes haphazardly nailed boards over the windows. They were Band-Aids on gunshot wounds, mostly, with the look of just being put up for appearances.

  But now those boards were gone. The five floors of Henderson Hill’s public front—offices on the two lower levels, progressively tighter security on the next three, but no heavy equipment, that was saved for other buildings—stared at us with compound centipede eyes. Some windows were starred with breakage, but the chicken wire mostly held everything up. Scarred, but not broken. On some hungry, avid little windows the cracks looked decorative.

  Like war paint, or the crackglaze in the makeup of an aging hooker.

  “The windows. Some were covered, before.”

  She was halfway through a one-syllable obscenity when chaos broke loose.

  20

  Henderson Hill’s front door shattered and the gravel rose in popping, excited bursts. I caught a flash of motion—something pale and human-shaped, flung aside as the attacker streaked down the stone stairs, straight for us, its claws making deadly little snicking noises.

  The thing was long, and low, and bullet-lethal. Anya hopped aside, whip already in her hand and flicking forward neatly, and I’d already squeezed the trigger twice as Saul faded behind me. It moved like a hellbreed, stuttering through space, and was between us in an instant, snarling and hunching, blood steaming on it. The sunlight drew lashes of scorch-smoke from its hide, but it merely bared broken, shark-sharp yellowglass teeth and snapped, ignoring the assault of that clean light. Its eyes were coins of diseased green flame, and as soon as they locked on me the thing let out a shattering squealgrowl and doubled on itself, flexible spine cracking as its back scythe-claws dug in.

  This was not a ronguerdo, a bonedog made by hellbreed that never ran by day. No, this was one of the creatures of Hell itself, and it was—

  “Hellhound!” Anya yelled, the word disappearing into a string of gutter Latin as she chanted, hunter sorcery rising in thin blue lines as every inch of silver on her flamed.

  Well, shit, I could’ve told you that. A flash of annoyance like bright sour sugar against my tongue, but the hound was in the air, body stretched out in a lean unlovely curve.

  Hit me, sound like worlds colliding, blood exploding from my mouth, something snapping in my side as we tumbled. I shot it twice more and had my knee up before we hit the ground, flung gravel pelting both of us. The hound snarled again, a low rumble of Helletöng boiling from its narrow ungainly snout, and the impact knocked me free.

  Up on my feet, ribs howling, boot soles sending up a spray of gravel as the gem poured a hot tide of strength up my arm. Leather flapping—those curved claws are hell even on tough cowhide—I skipped to the side, gun coming up and my left hand shaking my whip free with a quick sine-wave movement from my shoulder.

  It was a relief to have a clear-cut problem in front of me, even if I coughed and nails of agony cramped through my left side. Creaking pops as the ribs snapped out and messily fused together, etheric force jolting through my bone structure like an earthquake through a skyscraper, and when the hound leapt again, steaming and smoking and howling in ’töng, Anya’s chanting reached a fevered pitch behind me. If I could keep it busy enough, she could slow it down, then we could tear the goddamn thing apart.

  What was in the door? But Saul was already gone, scrambling past us up the stairs and plunging into the Hill’s maw. I had to forget about it, trust that he would take care of himself and—

  CRACK. It hit me again, and this time we simply blinked through space and smashed into the stone steps. The gem rang, a piercing overstressed note, and my scream was cut short.

  If I’d been paying fucking attention, I would’ve used the whip instead of letting it
smack me that time. More bones snapping, my head hit sandstone with stunning force and I actually pistol-whipped the thing instead of shooting it, my left fist coming up too, freighted with leather whip handle, and clocking it on the other side of its head. ’Breed mostly have a hard outer shell you can breach with silver, but hellhounds are elastic over hard bones, the skull a titanium curve under a gooshy, slippery-thick layer of congealed darkness birthing yet more scorchsteam as the sun lashed it. It reeked of corruption, and the gem hissed angrily on my wrist.

  Anya’s chant spiraled up into a scream. My left arm was up, and the thing’s jaws closed, teeth driving in. It had its back legs braced and snaked its misshapen head, hot bloody foam spattering as it shook me like a piece of wet laundry. Lines of blue sorcery bit, driving deep, and Anya yanked back. If the thing hadn’t been loosening up to take another bite of me, I would have gone with it as she whipped it back away from me, a hawkscream of effort escaping her as she pivoted, hip popping out and boots scraping through hop-bouncing gravel.

  The thing howled like a freight train with failed brakes on a steep grade. Warm trickles sliding down my neck because the noise was wrong—it reverberated through the ice bath of the Hill’s charged atmosphere and tore at sanity itself, an amplified squeal of psychic feedback.

  “Inside!” Devi yelled, and I was already scrambling to my feet, letting out a scream of my own as broken bones ground and my left arm burned, if its bite was septic we were looking at fun times.

  Never a dull moment around you, Jill. Get UP!

  She didn’t grab me to haul me up, but she didn’t bound past me, either. She covered as I made it, awkwardly, up the stone steps, struggling into the building.

  It was good tactical thinking. One-third of our force was inside here, we had a civilian we needed to track and lock down, and inside a building the number of approaches a hellhound could use were reduced.