Heaven's Spite

12

The Parks & Rec truck reeked of cigarette smoke and the fading perfume of hellbreed, but held nothing out of the ordinary. Vinyl seats, papers scattered everywhere, a plastic coffee cup half-full of ice-cold coffee and the rest filled up with used Camels filters. I glanced through the glove box, checked under the seats, gave the tires and undercarriage an exam.

Except for some fresh scratches on the bed, where something square and goddamn heavy had done a number on the paint job, there was nothing.

For the moment I was going to work on the assumption that the truck was stolen. I made sure there was nothing in there likely to make it blow up and cost me another couple cops, scanned it for any etheric disturbance, and decided to get out to Galina’s. Crosseye Garcia was tapped to give me a ride, and the entire way there he kept the scanner turned up to jet-takeoff level.

I guess I made him nervous. At least I kept the window down so he didn’t have to smell me.

Golden light was beginning to stretch and lick between buildings by the time we got to the right neighborhood. He let me off a few streets away from Galina’s, but before I got out I made sure he knew he wasn’t going home until he had a session with the headshrinkers. He cursed me roundly for that, and I replied with a grin and a slam of his cruiser door.

“Fucking freakshow,” he snarled before he gunned the engine and sped down the street, lights flashing.

I watched until he was out of sight, then disappeared into an alley, muscled up a fire escape, and cut across the rooftops. I circled Galina’s house warily, twice. An exhausted dawn hush clung to concrete, brick, siding, and pavement. The etheric protections on Galina’s shop reverberated uneasily, but they weren’t tolling like bells.

I sometimes wondered how hunters in other cities functioned without a Sanctuary around. Neutral supply of necessities to all the practitioners and quite a few of the nightsiders in a territory is the least of the services they provide. In Galina’s case, she was the closest to a confessor I’d ever have.

The Church doesn’t offer hunters Confession or Communion, because we traffic with Hell and commit the sin of murder every night. It was Galina who probably knew or guessed the most about me, with Mikhail dead. Saul didn’t ask—he knew everything he needed to. Perry? Don’t make me laugh—the more he thinks he knows, the less he actually does, and I want to keep it that way.

A chill finger touched my tired spine. You’re lying, Jill. He knows more than you think he does. You’re only a hairsbreadth ahead each time he plays one of his games with you.

A hairsbreadth was enough, wasn’t it? I wasn’t damned yet.

That was faint comfort indeed. And this was not a set of events guaranteed to make me feel better.

Ever since I’d gotten filled with plain lead right out in the middle of the street in front of the Sanctuary, I’d felt queasy coming in the front door. So this time, I dropped down soft as a cat from the neighboring rooftop, landing on hers. The greenhouse, its glass rapidly silvering as morning dew caught the dawn light, stood silent. Inside, green growing things breathed and dreamed.

The lock gave under my fingers and a tingle of sorcery. The color of the protections on the walls changed. I froze, and waited.

You do not drop in on a Sanctuary when she’s upset. You let her know you’re there, and you wait for her to let you in. Inside their thick walls, they have near-godlike powers.

I guess it makes up for being a tasty defenseless snack outside, kind of. But it would drive me utterly insane.

The protections calmed, flushing a dusky rose under a flood of mellow morning sunshine. I stepped inside, breathing in the smells of potting soil and fresh oxygen. My shoulders unhitched a little, before my pager buzzed again and cut off midway. Was that her calling again?

A long silver shape lay on a butcher-block table in the south quadrant of the greenhouse, placed for maximum exposure. It had been dead and black, a long time ago. Now the sunsword trembled eagerly against the table, its clawed crossguards chattering against the wood. The carved ruby at my throat woke up, warming, and the Talisman hummed a low, sustained note.

You can’t have a sunsword without a key, after all. The Eye had been the original key, and with it gone, the ruby Mikhail had given me functioned quite handily as a secondary. Wearing both of them while I was worked up was bound to make the sunsword edgy.

The empty place in its clawed pommel held a glimmer of crimson light before I exhaled sharply, my will flexing. The sunsword went back to sleep, I drew in a nice deep breath, and the trapdoor in the floor was thrown open from below, slamming into the chair used to prop it so hard the chair leapt back like a bee-stung dog.

Galina clambered up through the hole. Her marcel waves were disarranged, there were dark circles under her green eyes, and she was in her sleeping gear: boxers and a ragged blue Popfuzz T-shirt. Behind her, Hutch peered up through the trapdoor, his hair sticking up like a bird’s nest. He let out an undignified eep! and vanished.

“Jill.” Galina was breathless. The mark of the Order at her throat—the quartered circle surrounded by a serpent, a solid chunk of silver—glimmered. The walls resounded to her distress, and the morning light was very kind to her. “Jill, be very careful. Be very careful.”

I almost rocked back on my heels. Oh, Jesus. “I got your pages. What’s up?”

“I want you to be calm,” she continued, running right over the top of me. “I just want you to be calm. Calm down.”

“I’m perfectly calm.” I was beginning to get a hell of a bad feeling, but I was nice and chilly. “What the fuck?”

A familiar dark head rose up through the trapdoor. But it wasn’t Saul. It was Gilberto, and the instant he looked at me, his dead dark eyes flat and expressionless, I knew.

The world ground to a stop. I actually swayed.

“Oh, Jill.” Galina backed up two steps when I looked at her, fetching up against another table, this one holding empty pots and small shovels, twine, bamboo rods for bracing weak plants. Everything jumped, once, like a group of trained dogs twitching in unison. “It was right out in the street. We couldn’t—there was nothing—”

“Shut. Up.” It isn’t the sort of thing you say to a Sanctuary in her own home. But she stopped talking, high flags of color in her pale cheeks. My face felt strange, like it didn’t belong to me. Lying against my bones like a mask. “Gilberto?”

He finished climbing up, brushed his lean brown hands together as if ridding them of dust. Coppery highlights came out in his lank dark hair as he stepped into a bar of sunshine. “You takin’ me with you, bruja.” Flat and unironic. “We gonna have to burn some fuckers for this, es verdad.”

I didn’t want to ask. My traitorous mouth opened. The most banal thing possible came out. “I’m late. Has Saul finished breakfast?”

Because there was still time for God to see He’d made a mistake, and take it back. I should have known better. God doesn’t work that way.

He never has.

“Oh, Jill…” Galina’s hand clapped over her mouth.

“They took him,” Gilberto said. “They took el gato hombre, mi profesora. ’Breed and Traders. He put up a good fight. She”—he jerked his head at Galina, who grabbed the table as if it was driftwood and she was drowning—“knocked me ’cross the fuckin’ room, ay? I was gonna go out.”

Galina peeled her fingers away from her lips. “You would have gotten killed. Jill left you under my care. It was in the street; if he’d just been a little bit closer—”

Is he still alive? Not dead? “Galina.” I didn’t recognize my own voice. The trembling was in my arms, my legs. “Shut up. Please. Just for five seconds.”

She did. If there had been a clock, it would have ticked heavily in the thick silence. The scar burned against my wrist, and the sunsword chattered once more against the table. It was hard work to get it to stay still, with the Eye on my chest and the ruby at my throat spitting sparks. One, two. Little crackles of blue electricity.

Three. Four. Five. Then I counted again, because I still couldn’t put the words together. Finally, they came.

My throat was full of bitter ash. “Now.” I had to work to speak above a whisper. “We’re going to go downstairs. I need a new shirt and ammo. And grenades. And while you get those for me you are going to tell me everything.”

“I go with you.” Gilberto’s face settled into sallow stubbornness. “You hear me, bruja? I go with you.”

“Gilberto,” I said very softly, “do not fuck with me right now. Tell me everything you remember while I get a clean shirt.” I thought for a second. “And for God’s sake don’t get close to me.” It hurt to say it. The sunsword chattered again, and my hands were making fists and uncurling, completely independent of me. “I’m not safe.”