Heaven's Spite

11

The driver—a placid, tired, middle-aged Chicano I’d flagged down on Marivala—pulled over onto the shoulder, coming to a neat stop just behind a black-and-white with flashers lit up. They had two of the four lanes going south out of town blocked off, and it looked like Christmas had come early. His license said Paloulian, and I didn’t ask how he’d ended up with a Greek surname. In return, he barely even looked at me. Relying on sheer outrageousness to slide under the notice of normal people has its benefits. Besides, any cabdriver on shift long enough to greet false dawn sees a lot of weird.

Paloulian threw his smoking Camel butt out the window as soon as I closed the back door. His tires chirped as he took off, and the IN SERVICE bar on top of his cab flicked out. He slewed left to get through the empty lanes and took the exit for the industrial park, probably meaning to turn around and head back north.

Thank God there was no traffic just yet, at least not going this direction. And people complain about my driving.

There were at least six black-and-whites, a couple of nondescripts with bubble lights going, and yellow tape fluttering. A Parks & Rec truck sat in the middle, a big white goose among the flock.

All the activity was past the ditch, in a stand of trashwood serving as a modesty screen. The Strip is pretty lonely right here, for all that a regular patrol goes through on the freeway to discourage drag racers. It doesn’t work; pretty much twice a month in summer there’s a bad bustup right where the freeway curves after coming out of downtown.

This part of the Strip was past where the races usually end. The city limit’s about a half mile back, the freeway arrowing for the desert and the steadily lightening horizon in a straight gray line. There are still exits for fast food, industrial parks, or tiny suburbs, but right here there was nothing but concrete, the divider between northbound and southbound, and a strip of greenery on either side surviving on periodic runoff from uphill, where blank fences stood scrawled with graffiti. Greenery is a deceptive term; it’s mostly low slashwood and yellow weeds. Life clings to every breath of water out here, and clings hard.

I cocked my head. Dawn was coming fast, like a brass bell ringing along the eastern horizon. I’d be late for breakfast.

The question was, just how late?

I stalked for the carnival lights. The blue standing guard stiffened. It was “Crosseye” Garcia, so called to differentiate him from the twenty or so other Garcias on the force. Squat and balding, he didn’t quite have a lazy eye, but it was close. If my own mismatched gaze makes people nervous, Crosseye’s just makes them inclined to take him less seriously.

He doesn’t quite have something to prove, but it’s close.

“Hey, Garcia.” I settled for a closed-mouth smile. “Where’s Rosie?”

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “That way, with fuckin’ Paloma. Take a barf bag. It’s nice an’ juicy.”

“I heard they were crisped.”

“Some. Go take a look, freakshow.”

Considering Crosseye was only slightly less foulmouthed than “Fuckitall” Ramon, who never opened his mouth without an obscenity of breathtaking creativity slipping loose, I suppose I should’ve taken it as a compliment. I skirted the closest car and headed down the shoulder. “You’ve got such a winning personality. Goes with your smile.”

His reply was unrepeatable. We were all in such a good mood this morning.

I hopped the ditch and headed into the slashwood. Murmuring, someone’s voice raised in an exclamation of disgust. And something else.

A breath of smoky, corruption-laden perfume.

Pulse, respiration, my stride didn’t change. But my right hand reached down, drew the gun free. Another high sharp note of disgust, and I heard Rosenfeld, sharp as a new brass tack, saying something about Forensics. Hunter’s silence folded over me—the deep cloak of quiet that an apprentice learns early, because moving soundlessly is a survival skill.

There was a screen of brush along the top rim of a declivity. I edged along it to find the right angle. If there was a mass grave down there, I couldn’t smell it. Which was bad.

I slid through the brush, following the drift of the corruption. This was a goddamn fire risk right next to the freeway. Maybe Parks & Rec had been out here on a preliminary sweep before they cleared it.

At the darkest time before dawn? Come on, Jill. Something’s wrong here.

I kept the gun low as I stepped out of the brush.

I had a few seconds before they spotted me. Rosenfeld had lost more weight; she was just on the edge between looking good and stick-scary. She was on the far side of the site, her lantern jaw sticking out even more stubbornly than usual. Next to her, Ricky Paloma crouched easily, peering at something. Between us lay a shallow depression full of tangled shapes I didn’t look too closely at yet. Blues ringed the scene, all of them recognizable. I spotted the one stranger before he saw me, and the silence over me deepened.

He wore a taupe-and-green Parks & Rec coverall. Weed-thin, a thatch of dark hair—but his shoes were wrong. They were wingtips, not work boots. And the perfume of a hellbreed bargain clung to him.

Luck wasn’t with me. He twitched, dark eyes rolling like glass marbles, maybe sensing a current of bloodlust in the predawn quiet. He saw me, but by then I was already moving. I cleared the fresh-scraped hole and twisted charred bodies in one leap, and I would have been on him like white on rice except for his immediate flinching backward leap. As it was, I jerked and my left boot smacked him in the head with a sound like a melon dropped on an icy sidewalk before he landed.

Rosenfeld yelled. Someone else cursed. The Trader went down in a heap, arms and legs bending oddly, and rolled. Dirt exploded up, and I got a stomach-loosening noseful of grave smell and the bad-pork stench of charred bodies before I hit again, just bare inches away from his scrambling.

“Kismet!” Rosenfeld yelled, but the cry was choked off midway as the Trader lunged up to kneeling, hands splayed on the ground and knees wide akimbo, his lip lifting and the yellowing stubs of his teeth cracking as he growled.

The gun roared. I had to not only get him down and cuff him for questioning, but I had to keep him away from the cops he had been standing around bullshitting with.

The defenseless mortal cops.

Lured them here, maybe. Or lured me. What the hell?

That’s why the whip flashed forward, oddly quiet until it broke the shell of my silence; then silver-laced flechettes didn’t jingle but cracked like silver lightning. They tore across his chest, and he howled.

I screamed, too, a short cry like a falcon’s, and the gun was tracking him. He scrambled aside, but a single shot forced him into scrabbling to the right and back, away from my cops. He’d bargained for speed and probably strength, but I anticipated, and he jagged right into my next shot.

Which blew out his knee. The joint evaporated in a smear of red oatmeal flecked with white bone and the black lacing of hellbreed corruption. I was on him in a hot heartbeat, the whip doubled and slipping around his neck like it belonged there, my knee in his back and the other knee on his left arm. He tried to heave up, but when you lock the arm that high up they just have no goddamn leverage.

God bless jujitsu. Leverage is good.

“Motherfucker!” I yelled, cutting through the noise that was his howling and the screams of several grown men. I yanked back on the whip, twisting it, and choked him off. That brought down the volume somewhat. “Motherfucking cocksucking son of a bitch, what the fuck are you doing here? Huh? Having yourself some fun? Huh? What the fuck are you doing here?”

Rosie was making a lot of noise. I snapped a glance over my shoulder, just to make sure there wasn’t anything nightside-ish to worry about. Nope, she was just getting the boys back, shoving Paloma in front of her and yelling like a battlefield general. She was getting them into a firing line, and while I appreciated that, I was going to have to kick her ass for keeping herself and other cops in danger while I was working.

Just as soon as I took care of this fucker here. Which reminded me: I needed to ease up on the whip, or he was going to collect his eternal reward without telling me what he knew.

And we couldn’t have that, now could we.

I untwisted the taut leather a little bit, listened to him wheeze. Snapped another glance back. Rosie had the blues spread out, some of them kneeling, their backs to the brush. “Rosenfeld!” I yelled. “Get them back to the road, goddammit!”

The Trader was shuddering. It took me a second or two to realize he was laughing. Cold fury boiled through me, I choked him a little, and the laughter cut off. Creaking leather loosened when I figured I’d shown him there was nothing funny about the situation.

I heard Rosie and the others moving. Thank God. “Now.” I kept my balance. “Tell me what you’re doing here, Trader, and I’ll grant you a clean death.”

Another weird, quacking laugh. Shaking his whole body like a seizure. If he felt his shattered knee, he didn’t show it. “Hunter,” he crooned, through a mouthful of dirt. I hoped I’d broken a few teeth. “He said you’d be here. This is a gift. His gift to you.”

“Who?” No answer, so I choked up again a little until his body started juddering not with laughter but with panic. He was attached to his skin, this Trader. I let up a little. “Who?”

“Him.” A retching, he spat dirt and snot and saliva. “The table’s laid, the tide is turned. You’re dead. You just don’t know it.”

Oh, please. Like I don’t hear that or some variant every day. “The bodies. Who are they? Where are they from? It’s not like I won’t find out, so buy yourself some time. Make it easier on yourself.”

He writhed under me, yellow grass smoking and flattening away as my aura hardened. He was strong, but he had no leverage. What the hell was he doing here?

A low creaking sssssssssss from behind me jerked my head around. The Trader started laughing again.

A thin line of blue hellfire crawled between the corpses, sharp little fingers poking and prodding. The bodies twisted and jerked, and the curse laid on them triggered with a fwoosh of flame. The Trader tried to heave me off, I shoved him back down and twisted the whip again to cut off that goddamn screeching laughter.

What the hell? But I knew. Someone was jerking me around. If I was called out here, something was happening somewhere else. Goddammit.

I braced myself, eased up a bit on the whip. “Tell me!” I yelled over the snap-crackle rush of unholy flame. The small clearing leapt with sterile light, shadows dancing like little imps. “Give me a motherfucking name, or I will start cutting!” And hold bits of you in that goddamn fire over there for good measure.

The Trader merely writhed. I realized something was wrong right before the secondary part of the curse laid on the bonfire of bodies snapped, a line of force snaking from the pit—

—straight for me. Or more precisely, for the Trader I was perched on top of.

Oh shi—

The world went white and turned over. I flew, weightless, and hit hard, snapping through brush and rolling to shed momentum. Thorns and other things tore at my coat, little grasping fingers. All the breath drove out of me in a huff, but no bones broke.

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.