Angel Town

by Lilith Saintcrow

  The eastern horizon was a furnace. Caught in the valley, Santa Luz turned over, sighed, and began waking up. The skyscrapers glittered, and for a moment the whole city was open inside my head, the streets that made its arteries and the buildings its bones. The people moving through it, the city’s dream made flesh, but so vulnerable. They had no idea what abyss was yawning under their feet, and every night, even since before Mikhail’s death, I’d been fighting to keep them safe. There was no reward, no prize; few of them even knew my name.

  So why did I do it? Why hadn’t I taken Mikhail’s other offer—therapy, education, a way off the streets, my past wiped clear and a fresh chance at life as a civilian? I’d never even considered it.

  Because I’d wanted so badly to be worthy of what he’d done when he pulled me out of that snowdrift. Funny, that year it had snowed; I couldn’t remember a single white winter in the time since.

  My thumb popped out. “My city.”

  My city.

  Now I looked at my callused palm and fingers, the lines running across flesh, the bones of my knuckles. My hand curled into a fist, and the gem muttered sleepily against my wrist. When you got right down to it, was it any different from the scar of Perry’s lips on me?

  Do it for Saul. Do it for love.

  “I can’t.” There it was. “There isn’t enough left in me. You made sure of that. All of you fighting for a piece of me, pushing me around like a rat in a maze. Jesus.”

  What did that make me? If I couldn’t do this for love, what did it make me?

  Who the fuck cares? I’m going to do it anyway. None of it matters. Except Saul.

  Even if he was going to go down after I threw myself into this losing game, at least he’d be going down in a world where he had a chance. Where the hellbreed were checked. Not permanently, that would take a goddamn miracle. But I could keep the world spinning a little longer, and make it a little safer.

  It didn’t matter if I was doing it for them, or for myself. At least, I wasn’t going to let it matter.

  “I love you,” I told Mikhail’s headstone. For a moment I had a crazed hallucination of my right fist punching, the shock grinding the white stone to powder. I could do it, I was suddenly sure of that. Before, it had been hellbreed-jacked strength. Now the power came from somewhere else, and I didn’t have a clue what I would do if it deserted me. “Mikhail,” I whispered. “I hate you, too.”

  I didn’t recognize my own voice. Irrational, sudden fear drilled through me. I hunched my shoulders and waited. One breath. Two.

  Nothing happened.

  I looked up again at my city. The sun’s limb lifted sleepily from the horizon, swords of gold piercing the sky, and I felt dawn in my bones like the ocean must feel its tides.

  Another idea hit me. I actually rocked back on my heels, my brain jolting inside its heavy bonecase. The dogsbody lifted itself up, the imprint of its scorch on wet grass steaming, and shook itself. The flat ears pricked forward, and it stared adoringly up at me. It actually did look like a hound, and even my blue eye could find no trace of Jughead Vanner left in its long lean body.

  “Shit,” I breathed. “Shit shit shit. Come on.”

  The absurdity of talking to myself on Beacon Hill was enough to make me grin as I spun on my heel and left Mikhail’s glowing headstone behind. The dogsbody loped next to me as my stride lengthened, my coat flapping, and I broke into a run as the day came up like thunder.

  31

  HUTCHINSON’S BOOKS, USED & RARE, glowed in faded gold leaf on the wide dusty front window. I remembered how proud he’d been when we’d changed the name over from Chatham’s, and how soon the gold leaf had started to look dry and dusty, like it had never been anything else.

  He’d left the desktop, and while it booted up I grabbed a couple references from the other part of the store—the climate-controlled bit where he kept a hunter’s library. That library earned him some nice tax breaks and justified me saving his bacon when he was caught hacking something he shouldn’t be. Weedy little Hutch thought he was ten feet tall and bulletproof in cyberspace, and it didn’t help that he was usually right.

  I stacked the D’Aventine and Miguel de la Foya on the desk, sweeping aside a clutter of paper and setting a cup of moldering coffee higher up on the file cabinet behind his antique cubbyholed desk. The place was beginning to smell of sharpish rot and neglect, the dust and paper covering the peppery tang of a refugee emergency. I hadn’t given him much time to pack.

  I was grateful I’d sent him off, however.

  Everyone you love. Every one you cast your eye upon.

  Was Perry really that jealous? Or was it just a way to distract me? To keep me running until—

  The monitor blinked. I flipped open the D’Aventine, checking the binder that had been right next to it—a laboriously cross-checked index, and an old one. Hutch had bitched endlessly about the old dot-matrix even after he’d gone through two new laser printers by now, the same way old ladies complain about beaus who jilted them in youth. I’d learned to just make another pot of coffee when he started in on that.

  I wrote down page numbers and checked the de la Foya and the Scribus Aeternum, tapping a pencil while I scanned. I checked Kelley’s Habits of the Damned and Carré’s The Outbreak of 1929: Its Causes and Effects. Also, Hartmann’s Catholic Myths and Artur Fountaine’s La guerre d’Inferne.

  I knew what I was looking for. Confirmation and explication instead of a needle in a haystack. Still, I came up empty. Nothing about a particular Spear of Destiny that would fit the bill, and nothing about Perry even in Carré, who was generally held to be the authority on ’29. Even if he was a terrible writer, he was pretty much always dead-on.

  The constellation of intangibles that made the Outbreak possible—astronomical and astrological energies aligned to weaken the walls between the Visible and the other worlds, the Infernals collecting Talismans used to power the Portals in different locations, the carefully nurtured scurf infestations and overheated economy—were monstrous enough. Some Infernals have admitted there was a Leader who forced an alliance long enough for the portals to be achieved synchronously on different continents; there are even whispers of a full-blown hellmouth that stood for hours, admitting a flood of Infernals to our helpless world—

  He goes on for pages, refusing to speculate further but giving tantalizing hints, reporting rumors and in the next breath reminding the reader to rely only on the things that can be verified. The trouble is, ’breed don’t like appearing in the historical record. Carré had been a researcher much like Hutch; he’d disappeared in 1942. The hunter he’d been attached to—Simon Saint-Just—had also gone missing.

  It had not been a good time to be a hunter in Europe. Hell, things had been bad all over, and it wasn’t until the mid-sixties that we got some sort of handle on things.

  A hellmouth. A full-blown hellmouth, instead of the barriers between here and the hellbreed home gapping for just an instant to let a single monster through. Perry certainly didn’t dream small, and if it had happened once before, it could be done again.

  A Leader who forced an alliance…What had Perry said to me, more than once?

  I cannot hold back the tide forever. I’d stopped one of his bosses from coming through twice now. Or more precisely, Belisa had stopped him last time, before I’d shot her.

  And damned myself.

  Each time, the big bad boss had been struggling to step through a fractional gap, sliding into the fleshly world. That was bad enough. A full-blown hellmouth—a passageway to Hell held open for God knows how long—was going to be exponentially worse.

  How’s he going to power it? Ten to one says this Lanza del Destino. Major Talismans of a certain type can power a hellmouth for a while, but I can’t think of a Spear that applies. I sighed, rolled my head back on my sore, aching neck. The dogsbody dozed near the front door, seeming content just to lay there.

  Was I going to have to feed it soon? Did they stock hellbreed dog chow at the superma
rket? I wondered briefly if that was tax-deductible and closed Carré with a snap. Hutch was going to have a fit if I didn’t reshelve everything.

  Well, if he has one, it’ll mean I’m around to see it. That’d be nice. I considered the screensaver for a moment—pictures of cats with weird captions, shuffling by in random order. It vanished as soon as I tapped the space key.

  “Okay,” I said to the dusty silence. The air conditioner kicked on, cool air soughing through the store and Hutch’s silent, dark apartment upstairs. “Let’s hope digital is better than analog for this, huh?”

  It took me two hours of hunt-and-pecking and cross-referencing, broken only by a trip upstairs to make some coffee. Hutch’s fridge was unhappy in the extreme, so I left it closed after grabbing the canister of espresso-ground. I considered taking the garbage out, but one peek under the sink convinced me it was best left to itself. I was trying to stop a catastrophe here, not playing Molly Maid.

  Halfway through that pot of java, I leaned toward the computer screen. I’d finally signed into Hutch’s remote worktop, seeing what he’d pulled up recently. It was eerie that I could see what he’d last been looking at and when—he’d been up late last night, not going to bed until near dawn. I would’ve been on Beacon Hill by then.

  All excited about a woodcut, Devi had said. There were plenty of files in the image folder, I started going through them methodically. They bloomed over the expensive flatscreen monitor, and most of them were Perry.

  Bingo.

  Here Perry was caught by a telephoto lens, a black-and-white of him getting out of a car on a city street. The back of the photo, part of the same image file, held Mikhail’s spiky backward-leaning script: 1969, Buenos Aires. Another, this one in glaring color, clipped from a newspaper archive, all about new management at the Monde Nuit, decades later.

  I stared at the date.

  It was right after Mikhail had pulled me out of the snow. I shook my head, silver chiming in my hair. Huh.

  Another black-and-white, Perry leaning against a bar and smiling, white fedora pushed back on his head, his shark smile showing up in the mirror between gleaming bottles. Berlin, 1934. Back when the first Jack Karma was working Germany. That was pretty much the first mention of him I’d ever been able to dig up.

  I found the woodcut just as another scalding cup of coffee was going down. Mid-sixteenth century, originally from Bremen, now part of a museum collection. Thick black inked lines; the carver had been a genius. It was small as such things went, but exquisitely detailed—two cavorting figures under a full moon, facing a tall thin man in a long dark coat, his broadsword slanting up and flames running along its edge. He was unquestionably a hunter, and a long thin casket lay on the ground behind him. The title was Der Schutz der ersten Spear, and an electric bolt shot through me.

  The two attackers leered. One of them was unquestionably the late and unlamented piebald Halis, floppy hair and all, claws and teeth bared.

  The other was Perry, a spot of white in the woodcut’s florid lines, a slim orchid.

  “Oh, you son of a bitch,” I whispered. “I’ve got you now.”

  Only I didn’t. It took most of the afternoon before I had him, and when I did I was sweating, my teeth were chattering, and Hutch had run out of coffee.

  32

  I dialed Galina, but she didn’t pick up. Which was odd.

  I paged Anya from Hutch’s shop too, but there was no answer. Of course, she was probably in the barrio, trying to get the Weres to safety. I dialed my own answering service, but it just rang endlessly. I even tried ringing Monty, but after getting his voice mail for the fifth time I just hung up.

  From not remembering a single damn thing, I’d gone to being able to pull phone numbers out like I was shuffling through a card file. It was a goddamn pity nobody was listening, and the sun was past its apogee. The shadows were lengthening, and the dogsbody was nervous. At least, he looked nervous, pacing back and forth in front of the shop door, muscles rippling under blond hair. Whining while I dialed and dialed, getting no response.

  “Galina should be picking up,” I muttered. “What the fuck?”

  He couldn’t give me any reply, black-skinned ears fuzzed with blond fur laid flat against his ungainly head. Just that grumble, deep in his throat, spiraling up to an inquisitive at the end. I was still sweating, every nerve in me jumping and frayed raw.

  “Fuck! ” I finally snarled, and slammed the phone down. Just then, someone tapped on the glass, and the dogsbody growled, deep and low.

  I stalked between bookcases, my hand on a gun, peered at the dusty window.

  He tapped again. I almost fell over myself unlocking the door, grabbed his collar, and dragged him in. “What the hell are you—”

  Gilberto’s sides heaved. His face was painted with bright blood, and he was shaking. For all that, his dark eyes were alight, no longer flat and dead, and he looked completely, fully alive.

  “Mala suerte,” he gasped. “Mala fuckin’ suerte, chingada. Melendez, he prolly dead.”

  I locked the door and dragged him further into the shop. The air-conditioning soughed on again, and I smelled burned coffee and the flat copper tang of human fear and blood over the dust and paper.

  I propped him against a bookcase in the Classics section and took a deep breath. “Why aren’t you at Galina’s, then? That’s where you were supposed to—”

  “Been there.” He closed his eyes, gulping down air. “Chingada, mi profesora, the whole place burning.”

  “Burning? A Sanctuary?” I stared at him like he’d gone mad.

  “Barrio too. City’s rollin’ like Saturday night. Estamos corriendo en la chingada, mi profesora, we are fucked for sure. Was el Rubio at Melendez’s. Old man tole me run, tole me you’d be here. Almost din’t make it out.” He was gaining his breath rapidly, eyelids fluttering. “Ran for Lina’s, but it was on fire. Crawling with ’breed. Hopped away. Had to steal a horse.”

  Considering what he was telling me, I didn’t even want to take him to task for minor auto theft. “Galina’s shop was burning? The whole thing?”

  “Blue flames, profesora. Screamin’.” He’d regained his breath by now. “Whole goddamn thing. Looked bad.”

  Saul. Everything inside me turned over hard. Oh, God. Saul.

  But Galina had the vaults. It would be simple for her to just get everyone downstairs and rebuild. Blue flames, though. And whoever heard of someone burning down a Sanctuary? It would take the equivalent of a sorcerous nuke to do it. Not worth the trouble when they could just rebuild like a tree growing in fast-forward…

  “The fire. Blue. Hellfire, Gil?”

  “Looked like. Listen, I ain’t sure I’m clear—”

  Meaning he wasn’t sure if hellbreed had followed him. “It’s nice of you to be worried. Don’t be.” The machine inside my head clicked on, calculating, assessing, weighing. “It’ll take more than that to keep Galina down.” He wants her incommunicado. It was the only explanation. And without Galina to hold messages and ammo, Anya and I were looking at some difficulty. “Go upstairs. Bathroom’s second door on the left, grab the first-aid kit and wash the blood off. Then come down here, be ready to roll.”

  “Si.” He took off down the hall with enviable speed. Guess the young bounce back quick. And it was probably a relief to have someone giving him orders so he could just put his head down and do.

  I remembered that feeling from my own apprentice days.

  I peered out the front window, surveying the street. The shadows were clustering, the sky hot blue and cloudless. All the same, static electricity prickled under my skin.

  “Fuck,” I said, stupidly, under my breath. Like it was a secret. “Der ersten Spear.” The Prime Spear. The first spear-shaped Talisman. “Perry, you son of a bitch.”

  Well, Jill, what did you expect? He’s been planning this for decades.

  Another thought hit me, so suddenly I actually jerked and a half-amazed laugh burst out of me. “Of course. It’s Black Th
ursday, all over again.”

  The dogsbody made a short barking sound, like it was echoing my laughter. Outside, the shadows sizzled, and several of them lengthened. I didn’t like the way they were creeping toward the store, the world behind them warping into a colorless fuming wasteland. The blue of the sky was lensed with smoke now, and I snapped my fingers at the dogsbody. Its ears perked again.

  “Come on, you. Guess we’re not letting Gil come back down after all.”

  * * *

  “Where we goin’?” Gil yelled, clutching the bandage to his upper arm. His torn sleeve flapped in the wind roaring through the broken windows, I slewed the wheel to the right and shot us through a red light with half a foot to spare, ignoring the blare of a horn from a semi and nudging us over into the left lane. Oncoming traffic was a bitch, but the tingle of intuition running along my nerves told me left was the way to play this part of our run.

  I’ve never been in an accident. Basic precognition is good for something. Besides, the rush of traffic might slow down pursuit.

  It was nice to be behind the wheel again. Sort of.

  “Sacred Grace!” I yelled back. The blue Nissan didn’t have much pickup, but it was maneuverable, and that counts for a lot. Still, it was making a knocking noise I didn’t much like, and if I sent it over another few railroad tracks at high speed the tires weren’t going to be happy. “Where’d you get this car from, anyway?”

  “My cousin!” Thin blue lines of healing sorcery crawled under the bandage on his arm, knitting flesh together. He was armed, too, and grinning so widely I could see his fillings. “Discount por la familia! Got it cheap!”

  “Next time tell him to sell you American, for Christ’s sake!” I twisted the wheel again, we skidded around a corner, I feathered the brake and stamped the accelerator and we were off again. Gunfire erupted behind us, perilously close to our tires. They probably don’t know I’m driving. Perry needs me to make his little plan work. Or was he lying about that, too?