Flesh Circus

Chapter Twenty

Hutchinson’s Books, Used and Rare, was painted on the window in fading gold—but Saul and I parked four blocks away and slid up to the back door under a punishing wave of sun and heat. Midmorning, and it was already a scorcher. The shadows teemed with shapes, far darker than morning shadows had a right to be. I kept seeing the little glimmers of colorless crystal eyes and twitched for a weapon.

Saul didn’t mention it. Whether he was magnanimously refusing to comment or he didn’t sense them was an open question. I was willing to bet on the former.

I blinked the exhaustion out of my eyes and touched the doorknob. A thin thread of sorcerous energy slid off my fingertips, stroked the locks I’d built. They eased open, tumblers clicking with thin little sounds.

Saul crowded behind me. Gilberto was dropped off at Galina’s, wide-eyed and with a fresh cast on his arm. Galina, bless her, didn’t ask a goddamn question, just took one look at my face and clucked and cooed over the gangbanger, promising to get him into fresh clothes and get some healing sorcery on that arm. Technically I suppose I should have charmed the bone before we left the warehouse, but I had other things on my mind.

The whole time, Gilberto clutched Jack Karma’s knife. I didn’t ask him to let go of it. I guess that answered that question. I had a new apprentice. To add to all my other problems.

The door ghosted open. Paper, dust, and air-conditioning closed around us as I swept it to and relocked it. “Zombies,” I said for the third time. “In our living room. What next?”

“Well, at least we didn’t have to kill them in the kitchen.” Saul sighed heavily. “That kid…”

“He’s got the look.”

“Great.” Saul didn’t sound in the least excited. “Another person to get a slice of your time.”

“Is that what this is about?” I checked the shop. Books sat quietly on their shelves, leather-bound tomes stacked on chairs and on Hutch’s massive mahogany desk, shipwrecked in a sea of papers. A PC that hadn’t been there last time crouched on one corner of the desk, a shipshape new Mac on the other corner. The two laptops were in their traveling cases, tucked out of sight under the desk.

Pity he hadn’t taken his phone. The whole point of his vacation was to get him out and away from temptation, the little monster. The deal was, he hacked only when the local hunter needed him to, and the local hunter kept his ass out of jail.

Unfortunately, sometimes Hutch just couldn’t help himself. He’s small and beaky and a Cowardly Lion, but a challenge in cyberspace? Suddenly he’s Superman, six feet tall and bulletproof. And completely without any goddamn self-control at all. I had to wait until things calmed down and the local FBI liaison, Juan Rujillo, finished smoothing the ruffled feathers before Hutch could come back.

Saul sounded angelically innocent. “What what is about?”

“You.” I turned past the small kitchen where Hutch heated his lunches, opened an EMPLOYEES ONLY door. “And whatever it is you’re sitting on.”

“I’m not sitting on anything.”

Yeah, that’s why you can’t touch me anymore. That’s why you flinch whenever I get a little frisky. “Okay. When you want to talk about it, fine.” The small room was lined with bookshelves, and even the dust in here vibrated with secrecy. Ordinary people wouldn’t even see the door we’d just ducked through. Though precious few people came in here; this place was kept afloat because of the hunter’s library. Hutch got a stipend and dispensation for when he occasionally went breaking a few electronic-surveillance laws in service to whatever case I was working at the time; I got a research library and an extra pair of eyes to go digging through dusty tomes whenever the end of the world drew too nigh.

“We never have time.” Did he actually sound sulky?

Jesus. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Do I sound like I’m kidding?” He let out a sharp sigh. “Work comes first. I know. I just have to talk to you sometime.”

“So talk to me.” I pushed aside the conference table, a big wooden thing suspiciously clean and neat now that Hutch was out of town and I hadn’t been bothering him to look things up for me. Saul bent down and lent his strength, even though I was already handling it. The legs scraped across cheap industrial carpet, and it fetched up against one of the overloaded bookcases. A copy of Luvrienne’s Les Chateaux de Chagrin teetered on a shelf; I prayed it wouldn’t fall. There’s only six of the copies he produced in existence, and it’s one of the best all-around books about the Sorrows to have been written in the last four hundred years.

Nobody knows you like your own. Luvrienne had barely escaped the fate that stalks every male in a Sorrows house, lived to write about it—and they track down and destroy every copy of the book they can find. Just like they tracked him down and took him back.

Fortunately, Hutch scanned it into a digital archive and emailed it to every hunter’s library we had addresses for. He gets orders from other libraries for printed copies. The digital age is a wondrous thing.

However, I don’t want to touch the damn book if I don’t have to. I know too fucking much about the Sorrows to want that.

I snagged the loop of denim sewn into the carpet and yanked up the cutout square. The concrete underneath was smooth and featureless, its expanse broken only by a recessed iron ring. I grabbed the ring, set my legs, and let out a breath while heaving up.

A hellbreed-strong right fist helps when you have to lift a concrete slab. But you still have to lift with your legs, not your back. Ergonomics for hunters—a bad back is a liability. Saul kept out of the way—there wasn’t enough room for him to help.

I keyed the code into the climate-control pad and slid the glass panel aside. A few items Galina keeps for me; I learned my lesson when that Sorrows bitch stole Mikhail’s talisman and rifled all his personal stuff. But the papers are here. All the salvageable vitals on the hunters of my lineage, down from the first and second Jack Karmas. Before the first Jack, we don’t know anything.

This isn’t the kind of career that lends itself to leaving evidence in the historical record. The day world, the real world, doesn’t want to know. Hunters sometimes rely on sheer outrageousness to slide by unnoticed. A regular civilian’s reaction to a genuine paranormal event is usually screaming and running in the other direction.

Emerson Sloane’s files were very thin. The big Santa Luz fire of 1938 had eaten most of the records he’d left, one way or another. A bare triple-handful of manila folders labeled in a round Palmer script, some with notations in Mikhail’s broad firm hand with its Cyrillic notations followed by English translations.

I flipped through them. About twenty had no connection to anything remotely resembling the current clusterfuck we were looking at. My pager went off; I dug in my pocket and pulled out the other thirteen files that looked promising.

I gave my pager a cursory glance. It was the Badger. Maybe she had something for me.

“Do you still want me?” The words just burst out of Saul and hung in midair.

It was like being punched in the gut. I sucked in dust and paper-laden air. The dead quiet of the bookstore closed around the sound, and my hands went nerveless for about half a second. I almost dropped the files.

“Of course I do,” I told the hole in the floor. “I always have. What the fuck?”

“My family’s gone.” It was a simple statement of fact. “My mother’s dead. Billy Ironside killed my sister. My mother’s sisters are… well, I’m not theirs. They have their own cubs. If I didn’t have a mate, it’d be different. But…”

“But there’s me. And I’m not a Were.” There it was, half the dysfunction in our relationship laid out in plain words. The other half didn’t need to be spoken. I’m tainted. I’ve got a hellbreed mark on my wrist and a serious rage problem. I’m not a nice person, Saul. I’m not even a good person, despite your thinking so. I’m a hunter. End of story.

“I don’t care what you are,” he answered quietly. “You need me, Jill. You’d kill yourself over this if someone wasn’t reminding you…”

“Reminding me of what?” I flipped through the first file, scanned it. No connection. The second, too. My eyes were hot and grainy, and I was hoping I wouldn’t miss anything. My heart was a lump in my throat, the words had to squeeze around it.

Five little words. “That you’re worth a damn.”

Mikhail was the only man who ever thought I was worth a damn, I’d told him once.

Not the only one, he’d told me later. Tit for tat, we were even, except we weren’t.

We would never be even. Not while I was still breathing. Only it wasn’t the kind of debt you could repay, or even anything that could be called a debt at all.

I didn’t know what it was, except maybe love. Or something so huge it could swallow me, something that terrified me when I thought he might not want me anymore. Mischa thought I was worth plucking out of a snowdrift and training, but he left me behind. I wasn’t worth enough for him to stay. And that little voice inside my head, buried under a hunter’s iron.

You’re not worth anything. You’re ugly. Too ugly for anyone to love. Even my mother, the bitch, had said so.

And, I mean, come on. Just look at the man. Even gaunt and grieving, he was Native American calendar beefcake, broad-shouldered and dark-eyed.

Who wouldn’t want him? Who wouldn’t feel their breath catch every time he looked their way?

The third file fell open under my numb fingers. I blinked back hot water and what felt like rocks in my eyes. The little tingle of intuition ran up my arms and exploded under my breastbone. A puzzle piece fell into place with a click so loud I was surprised it didn’t knock over a few books.

“Holy shit,” I breathed.

There, clipped to the inside of a folder probably older than I was, a singed, faded black-and-white photo glared at me. Saul approached, but I kept staring.

The jaw was the same. So was the blond hair, the sculpted lips, and the straight thick eyebrows. And the glint of gold around the teeth. And the bad skin, but underneath that…

All this time I’d thought she was just an ugly woman. Funny how beauty mutates according to expectation.

My Were bent down, and his warmth touched my back. “Huh.” The faint ghost of zombie clinging to us both faded under the good smell of him, male and fur. “Is it Zamba’s brother?”

“I think it’s Zamba.” I moved my hand so he could see what Sloane had written on the mat, the fountain pen marks digging hurriedly into the yellowing fibers.

Arthur Gregory, missing, presumed dead. I flipped the file closed. “Jesus.”

“Huh. She didn’t smell male.”

“It can’t just be a coincidence.” I handed him the file and leaned forward, jammed the others back in vaguely where they went. “Right under my goddamn nose all the goddamn time. I hate that.”

It took under a minute to get the vault closed up. I tugged the carpet square back over the cover and smoothed it down, turned sharply to find Saul just standing there, a line between his dark eyebrows, staring at me.

The urgency of a case heating up bit me sharply, right in the conscience. Goddammit, can’t this wait?

But no, it couldn’t. I braced myself and met the problem head-on. “Don’t worry about me.” There it was again—that sharp tone, the grating whine underneath it. “I did this job before you came along, Saul. If you’re aching to get back to the Rez, you can go. I wouldn’t hold it against you. God knows nobody else has ever been able to fucking put up with me.”

Jesus. I meant to say something gentler. Like I love you, don’t leave me. Or even just, I need you too much. I don’t care.

I did, though. I cared that the dark circles under his eyes were getting bigger, that his ribs were standing out sharply, and that his shoulders were hunched. Those were only the first few things in the long list of things I cared about when it came to him. It all boiled down to him maybe not wanting to keep banging his head on the steel wall I couldn’t figure out how to drop. The place in me where I’d been broken and remade, beaten until I turned strong. I’d figured he knew the way through the wall without my having to tell him. It was there every time I woke up next to him and my heart hurt because he was next to me, warm and breathing.

Because he knew me.

“Do you want me to?” His mouth pulled down at the corners, bitterly. “What did I do?”

Huh? I searched for a handle on my temper, didn’t find one. The rock in my throat turned into sharp ice edges. “You? You didn’t do anything, goddammit. If you’re trying to figure out how to gracefully get rid of me, Saul, don’t worry about it. It’s okay.”

I was lying. It wasn’t anywhere near okay. But I would say it was. For him.

“Jill…” He made a helpless motion just as my pager buzzed again. “I’m sorry.”

I had a sudden, violent urge to grab my pager, throw it across the room, and shoot the motherfucker for good measure. “Don’t be sorry. Look, I know something’s wrong. It’s been wrong since you came back. I’m sorry. I should have known it was too good to be true.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” There it was, a spark of anger. It was a relief—when he was angry, the twenty-pounds-underweight-and-unhappy-too wasn’t so visible.

I grabbed the file. He didn’t resist. “You don’t have to make any excuses to me,” I informed him. “No promises, no deals, no bargains. You said that the very first night. If you can’t stand me anymore, it’s okay. I expected it. Just go ahead and go. Find a nice tabby and raise a litter or three. God knows you’re domestic enough.”

“Are you insane?”

Holy hell and hallelujah. He’d actually shouted at me. No more moping; he was now officially pissed off.

I closed my eyes, the massive mental effort needed to think clearly dragging at every inch of my body. The shaking had me in its jaws and wouldn’t let go.

Zamba, Arthur Gregory. Some kind of beef with the Cirque, and his brother? Who knows? He found a bargain somewhere—probably voodoo. And the Twins, they specialize in androgyny. It would make sense, it would make a whole lot of sense.

He went to Lorelei, Lorelei brokered a deal. Now that the Cirque is back, Lorelei was a liability, and her death would serve as fuel, and payment for the loa too. As well as the deaths of Zamba’s inner circle. The possessions could be aftershocks or for some other part of Zamba’s plan.

And once the possessed had died inside their violated bodies, they were easy meat for reanimation, and payment for the loa. Zamba was mortgaging herself to the hilt for this, whatever it was. Revenge?

Probably.

There were things I had to do. I opened my eyes, found I was staring at the ceiling. The acoustic tiles all but vibrated until I realized my goddamn eyes had fucking flooded. I couldn’t blame it on the dust in the air. Everything shimmered as I blinked, trying to get them to reabsorb the water. “I’m not crazy. I’m just saying that if you can’t bring yourself to touch me anymore, something’s obviously very wrong. You’re torn up over your mother, I know. I understand. But don’t kill yourself staying with me because you think you have to. If you have to cut me loose and go back to the Rez, if this isn’t what you need or want, you’re free as a fucking bird. I can’t keep you, Saul. I won’t keep you.”

My pager quit buzzing. I tipped my chin back down and got a good look at him.

Saul stared at me as if I had indeed lost my mind. His mouth opened, then closed. I clutched the file to my chest like a schoolgirl with her books.

“I’ve got to go,” I finally said. It sounded very small in the stillness. “I’ve got to figure the rest of this out. Any moment now it could blow sky-high.” Knowing pretty much who I was dealing with gave me more to work with. The other big question—why—could be attacked now, and wrestled to the ground. Not to mention pistol-whipped and shot, if the occasion called for it.

I was so tired it didn’t even sound like a relief.

“Jill—” Saul had finally found his voice.

If he was going to tell me that he wanted to go back to the Rez, I was going to start screaming. I couldn’t afford to lose it now.

People were counting on me. A whole city full of them. My people, in my city.

“Save it.” The words were a harsh croak. “Do what you’re gonna do, Saul. If you’re going to leave me in the dust, make it quick and clean. If you ever loved me, do it that way. Don’t drag it out.”

I stamped past him, every string in my body aching to stop and touch him, throw my arms around him, and maybe engage in some undignified begging. Screw the entire city, screw everything. I didn’t care as long as he stayed with me. As long as there was a chance.

But. One teensy-tiny little but.

I’m a hunter. It’s that simple.

If Zamba-Arthur or whoever it was kept killing Cirque performers, things were going to get sticky. There’s very little a really motivated voodoo queen can’t do to you, and she’d already hit the hostage, too. Perry was there, but if she found some way past him—or if he decided it was too much trouble and some chaos served his ends—well, it would be party time for the entire Cirque and I’d have Perry and a renegade fucking voodoo queen to deal with.

Big fun.

It meant a lot of innocent people dead or maimed. It meant hellbreed thinking they could slip the leash and make trouble in my town. It meant years of steady work keeping things under control wasted.

It meant more victims.

And there was just no fucking way I was going to stand for that.

No matter what I stood to lose.