Heaven's Spite

19

Jill?” The Badger, sounding a little less than calm. Which meant severe trouble. “Thank God.”

“What? More bodies?” Not like I have time for them. Jesus.

“No. Vanner. He’s gone. Disappeared from the hospital. The trauma counselor says he’s still in shock. She’s afraid he’ll…” The Badger’s voice didn’t break, but it was close.

“Tell all the black-and-whites to look for him. I’ll do my best too.” Goddammit. Shit, shit, shit. “How did he check himself out?”

“That’s the weird thing. He didn’t. He’s just gone.” Then Badger dropped the other shoe. “His uniform’s still there, though. Wherever he is, he’s in his hospital johnny.”

“Oh, Christ.” I tried not to sound aggravated. “Okay. Keep a surveillance on the scene he stumbled across, he might go back there. Put out an APB on him, and roust Montaigne.” Sorry, Monty. “Tell him to get whoever he can working Vanner’s trail. See if we can pull him in.”

“Sully’s raising Montaigne now. Anything else?”

I struggled to think. There was one more thing. “Call Wallace again. Give him the situation. See if he and Benito can scare up anything.”

“Okay.” She sounded a lot more reasonable now. Of course, nobody could ever call the Badger unreasonable. But I could hear the relief now that she had a list of things to do.

“When he shows up, have Wallace or Benito or Avery take custody. Do not put him in a holding cell. Got it?”

“Oh.” I could hear the wheels turning as she took this in. “All right.”

“Good. Have the next of kin been contacted on those bodies yet?”

She actually sounded surprised. “Not yet. Figured it was better to hold off until I heard from you again.”

Meaning, she was hoping I’d call and tell her it was all right to release them. Even the Badge cavils at telling a civilian family they can’t collect their violated dead. I hated to have to ask them to do it. “And Rosie and Paloma, do they have anything on the other site?”

“I checked with Rosie not a half hour ago. Not yet. Stanton’s having a hissy fit over the number of bodies. Going to have to start putting them in nooks and crannies.” She moved the phone a little. I could just see her at her cluttered desk.

“Stanton’s always having a hissy. One more thing. Warehouse fire, 154th and Chavez. Start the paperwork for a paranormal incident, if you find any bodies buzz me again.”

“Jesus Christ.” For a moment there she sounded like Monty. “You’re a busy little girl, Kismet.”

“The moment the nightside slows down, I will too. Thanks, Badge. Keep me updated, and I’ll keep an eye out for Vanner.”

“All right.” She hung up, and I stood there for a second staring at the phone. The Weres were quiet, but someone was stirring something briskly in the kitchen. The tapping of a metal whisk inside a glass mixing bowl sounded so familiar, as if Saul was standing there after a long night’s work, making breakfast. Probably burritos, because nothing goes down after a night of killing hellbreed like eggs, ham, potatoes, chipotle Tabasco, cilantro, and a nice cold beer.

I shook the thought away. Focus, Jill. Picked up the phone, dialed again. “Galina? It’s Jill. Put Hutch on.”

She didn’t waste time asking me what was going on. “Oh, thank goodness… Hutch! It’s Jill!”

I heard him bitching all the way up to the phone. “Worried sick about you,” he ended up mumbling, as Galina handed the phone over. “Jesus Christ. What?”

I could just see him standing there with pen and a pad of paper, bracing himself. Thank God he had enough sense to stay where I put him. Not like my disobedient apprentice.

“The hellbreed someone may be trying to bring through is probably named Julius.” I spelled it for him. “Cross-reference it with Perry, see what you come up with. Do you have anything on the Sorrows calendar yet?”

“Nothing, we’re in the Dead Time. Something interesting, though; there was a Sorrows House burned in Louisiana a week ago. Completely torched. Resident hunter out there—it’s Benny Cross, by the way, he says hi—says hellfire was involved.”

Louisiana. Okay. “Did he mention the spectrum?”

“I knew you’d ask. Green, shading up into blue.” Hutch’s tone dropped to a whisper. “Bad news.”

Yeah, anything above orange on the spectrum was incredibly bad news. The saving grace was that the higher on the spectrum, the less likely a ’breed was to be wholly physical, which meant sorcery and banefire could be used to disrupt them.

On the other hand, I’d seen Perry produce blue hellfire. And he was all-too-disturbingly physical. This put a whole new wrinkle in the equation.

“Did Benny say anything else?”

“Just that the Sorrows are mad as hell. He’s watching them go after hellbreed. Not getting in the middle of that unless they drag a civilian in, he says.”

Reasonable of him. If ’breed and Sorrows were looking to off each other, it made his job easier. Mostly. “Yeah. Okay, next thing. Would banefire break the link between a Trader and a ’breed? Like, a complete encirclement of banefire, cut it off completely?”

Silence crackled over the phone line. I shoved down the impatient need to say something more while he worked it around in his head. There was a sizzle of something hitting a hot pan, and I smelled eggs. Missing Saul rose like a stone in my throat. Was he in pain? Was someone maybe torturing him?

I told that line of thought to take a hike. It just laughed at me and kept on going. That’s the problem with seeing so much of the nightside. Your imagination just works too damn well, because it has a lot of food to keep it going.

“It’s possible,” Hutch finally said. “Very possible. Banefire creates a psychic barrier as well as a physical one. What’s going on, Jill?”

“Do you really want to know, Hutchinson?” I sounded more savage than usual, had to stop myself. “Look, dig up anything you can out of the theory books, okay? Check Malvern and the Breisler.” I considered telling him to go through the hunter records in Galina’s vault for the hell of it, but what would I tell him to look for? Evidence that Mikhail or Jack Karma had an agreement with a hellbreed?

I didn’t want to believe it. But the poisonous seed of doubt was planted. God damn Perry.

Too late. He’s as damned as he’s going to get. You need to make sure you don’t follow him.

“Breakfast in ten minutes,” the Were in my kitchen said quietly, and murmurs went around. I felt their attention, though they were tactfully not listening. It felt like more had arrived, too. The fridge was going to be picked bare, and they would restock my groceries before they left.

“When you put it that way…” Hutch gave a long-suffering sigh. “Should I still keep digging for that Argoth asshole?”

Thank God for you, Hutch. I rested the phone on my shoulder, so I could check my guns. They were where they always were. I forced my hands away. “Yes. I’m not ruling that out just yet. Better safe than sorry.”

Scratching of pencil against paper. “Okay. Look up Julius, keep working Argoth angle, cross-check with Perry, check for banefire breaking connections between ’breed and Traders. Is there anything else on this Julius character, anything at all?”

“He likes virgins.” I snorted. “Does that make you feel safer, or not?”

“I went to college,” he informed me huffily, and hung up. I laid the phone down gently, restraining the urge to slam it into the cradle and crack the plastic. The Talisman trembled on my chest, like a live thing.

It was a live thing. Now I couldn’t even remember Mikhail wearing it without thinking of Perry. Or Belisa.

Sunlight strengthened in the skylights. I stood there, staring at the phone for a moment and breathing deeply. Keeping the lid on that box of rage bouncing around at the bottom of my chest.

“All done up?” Anya, at my shoulder. She was so damn quiet, even for a hunter. I almost twitched. “Let’s get this over with, so we can eat. I’m starving.”

She was always starving. No wonder she got along with Weres so well.

It was an uncharitable thought. My entire body hurt, vicious little nips of pain all over. Even my hair hurt, the charms weighing it down. “Yeah.” But I stared at the phone for another couple of seconds, willing it to ring and tell me something useful.

Something like, It’s me, kitten, I’m free and coming home.

A hand on my shoulder. This time I did twitch, but did not draw a gun. I found Anya examining me. She didn’t look perplexed or concerned. There was a faint vertical crease between her eyebrows, and I saw the beginnings of crow’s-feet radiating from the outside corners of those blue eyes.

There is a disconcerting directness to a hunter’s gaze when they’re completely focusing on you. It’s a hunter’s job never to look away—we bear witness, and we watch what others can’t bear to.

Mikhail taught me that. He’d been old for a hunter when I met him, but still lethal. And here was Anya—I remembered her as an apprentice, the first time Larssen brought her over to help Mikhail and me with a Black Mist infestation let loose by a circle of cannibalistic Traders. She had been quiet and watchful even then, the kind of girl who would vanish at a crowded party until you struck up a conversation and realized just how pretty and smart she really was. “Hides her light under a bushel,” was Larssen’s succinct sum-up.

She was getting older, too. While I looked just the same. I only felt old.

“Maybe breakfast first?” She actually looked hopeful.

“No.” My throat was dry. “Let’s get this over with.”

The etheric protections on my warehouse walls were awake, tendrils of blue light sliding through the physical structure. My blue eye, and the unphysical gauze layer of Sight over the natural world, could see it clearly enough. Anya immediately moved a few steps to my left, and I knew without looking that she’d drawn one of her guns.

The sparring space was large and open, hardwood-floored, skylights everywhere filling up with gold. I could have wished for some more sunlight, but wishing never did anyone any good.

Mirrors and a ballet barre marched down one side of the room. Weapons were hung on the other three walls; at the far end, pride of place went to a long shape under a fall of amber silk. The spear quivered gently, sensing a current of bloodlust in the air. Between the lance and the Talisman humming sleepily on my chest, I could probably handle Perry if I had to.

It was a comforting thought. For a certain value of comforting, I guess. The fact that I would rather not lay a hand on the spear unless I had to was incidental. Wasn’t it?

In the middle of the open space, Melisande Belisa knelt, her battered feet still bleeding a little on the hardwood. Her silks were torn, and she reeked of smoke. The iron collar clasped her delicate neck, laid against her shoulders like a yoke, and thin threads of blood slid down from where it rubbed against her skin. The Chaldean marks on it ran with diseased gold. Her black eyes were completely blank.

The chain crawled with those same golden runes. They unraveled halfway up its length. Now that’s interesting. I hadn’t asked Hutch about collars for a Sorrow. I was going to have to do that.

He was really earning every single moment’s worth of effort I’d spent on getting him back home without federal charges.

Perry crouched in front of the Sorrow. He was immaculate again, and I wondered where he’d cleaned up. The pit of my stomach turned over hard, thinking of him in any of my bathrooms. Or, maybe worse, not having to—just stepping out of the grime and smoke tarnish and somehow becoming his usual self.

They were both moving slightly. Perry would lean forward a little, shifting his weight, and Belisa would lean back just as infinitesimally. Then he would relax, rocking back, and she would go back to her slump-shouldered kneeling.

He was making a slight crooning sound, too, like a child trying to entice a reluctant dog.

A nasty, sociopathic little child.

My gorge rose. I swallowed bitterness. “Pericles.” It had all the snap of command I was used to putting into it. “Answers.”

He was silent for fractionally longer than was polite. At least it stopped that goddamn crooning. “Hello, darling.” Soft, reasonable, bland. “Do you like her? She’s so wonderfully decorative. And so predictable, too. Always treacherous. You appreciate that in a woman after a while. Constancy of its own sort.”

I kept my hand away from my guns with an effort. “Tell me about Julius, Perry.”

He was still for a whole long-ticking fifteen seconds. Utterly, eerily still—not the stillness of a hunter, which contains little bits of motion in its own way. No, this was as if he’d turned into an inanimate object. The scar was full of soft fire, little brushes against it like the wet rasp of a cherry-red, scaled tongue.

When he did move, it was to slowly straighten, his legs stretching out. He made a queer little twitch with his head. Something inside his neck crackled a little. “There are other things I’d rather tell you about.” He didn’t turn to face us, and Anya drifted another few steps, stepping soundlessly.

It was a comfort to have another hunter in the room.

“Start with Julius, Perry. Save the rest of it.”

“Oh, but you’ll want to hear this. It seems my lackey was rather a naughty boy. He gave you a gift I had no intention of giving just yet, but I can’t begrudge it to you. Tell me, how does it feel to know your teacher bore the same cross you do?”

A gift for you. For a moment I thought he’d meant the bodies near the freeway, and bile rose in my throat. Then the meaning hit home.

My jaw set so hard my teeth ached. Basic healing sorcery means they don’t shatter or fall out very easily. Still, there was something creaking in my mouth. The creaking slid down my neck, and the scar was soft velvet. Wet pleasure slid up the nerve channels, touching my shoulder like a lover’s hand.

It was just like being in the room off his white bedroom, the one with the tiles and the iron rack and him fiddling with the scar, trying to make me react. Trying to make me jump the way he wanted me to.

Anya glanced at me. The silver in her hair slid soundlessly. Her eyebrows were up, her lips slightly parted as if she wanted to say something. Her leather duster whispered slightly as she moved again, covering Perry from another angle that would mean she could shoot clear of Belisa.

I wanted to tell her not to bother. The sooner that snake’s head was chopped off, the better.

Then why didn’t you do it, Jill?

Because doing it for the wrong reason would damn me. Even more thoroughly than a hunter could be said to be damned in the first place. Even if nobody else knew the difference, I would, and that was all that mattered. Knowing that difference and doing it anyway would make me no better than the things I hunted.

And then Perry’s little smile would turn into a sawtooth grin, and I would pay for every single insult I’d ever offered him.

That would keep him busy for a long, long while. And he’d make sure I was awake for all of it.

Oh, I knew. I’d known since the beginning. I’d realized it the moment he’d made the offer, that cherry-red tongue flickering out to touch his bloodless lips. Perry and I were playing this game for different reasons. I wanted the power to keep cleansing the night.

He wanted something else. Something that would end with me even worse than a Trader.

“I know Riverson told you.” Silken, even, each word just so. “I regret I wasn’t there to see your face. Such an interesting shade of white. Almost as pale as you are now.”

“Julius.” I managed the one word, found I could use others. “Your immediate superior?”

“I? I have no superior, my darling. And certainly no equal, in this world or in Hell.” Now he turned on one elegant heel, and though his suit was perfectly clean and his hair neatly arranged, his face was still streaked with smoke. It glared at me, that mask of banality, the even regular features unassuming except for the shadow of twisting under them, like a knife under a blanket. His eyes burned blue, a sterile inferno as far away from Anya’s clear steady gaze as it was possible to get.

“Hellspawn,” the other hunter said, softly but with an edge of incredible disdain. “Answer the question.”

“Little human hunter.” He didn’t look away from me. “You’re interfering with business not your own.”

“Ooooh, scary.” Her tone said very clearly that she wasn’t impressed. “Kismet?”

It took two tries to make my throat work. Fortunately the words came out just right—bored, with an edge of menace. “Julius, Perry. Your immediate superior, coming through to ask you a few questions. Belisa playing both sides against the middle again. You should have learned not to mess with Sorrows last time.”

The snarl drifting over his bland face was a balm. It disturbed the mask of humanity for a critical half second. Now I was in control of myself, and I slid the gun free of the holster.

Anya exhaled softly. But her pulse was even and steady, marching along. Mikhail was always on me about my pulse. My heart cracked, but no expression reached my face. “One more time, Pericles. Julius. Rutger planning on moving you aside, since Shen didn’t manage?”

He considered me. Lifted one hand, tapped a finger to his smoke-grimed lips. “Don’t you ever wonder why your teacher sought out his death at the hands of a Sorrows whore?”

“That’s none of your business.” I raised the gun. “The next time you sass me, Pericles, it’s going to be a bullet. Start talking about Julius.”

“It started with Jack Karma. The first one, dear, not the pale copy. I’d been looking for a hunter lineage with certain… peculiar qualities, and I finally found one. The Karma children have always had such charming personalities. A fault line right down the middle, hair-thin but so vulnerable.”

I’ll admit it. I lost my temper. Two steps forward, Anya drifting with me, and my finger tightened on the trigger. “Julius, Perry! Start fucking talking.”

He actually smirked, the bastard. “Language, Kiss. Such indelicate—”

I took another step forward, but Anya was quicker. The knife blurred, parting the air with a low sweet sound, and sank into his throat. He folded down, making a very undignified choking sound, and I stood and stared like a civilian.

Anya glanced at me. “You didn’t know? How could you not know?” She now had both guns out, and pointed at Perry while he keeled over onto the floor with a far-too-heavy thump.

The world shifted underneath me. Just a few inches, but that was enough.

Riverson I didn’t have to believe. But Anya was hunter, and hunters don’t lie. Not to each other.

We can’t.

I actually swayed, half-turning and staring at her. My mouth dropped open, but no sound came out. The .45 almost slid free of my fingers; they spasmed shut at the last moment.

I found my voice, a harsh croak that didn’t sound like me at all. “What?”

“I thought you just didn’t talk about it.” Her coat whispered as she stepped aside again, to make sure her angle of fire was still clear. “Jesus, Kismet. How could you not know?”

“I…”

Perry gurgled. He reached up, fingers closing around the knife hilt. Worked it back and forth. An obscene squishing sound came from the unholy flesh while black ichor welled up sluggishly. She’d pegged him right in the larynx, missing the arteries neatly. A double-bladed dagger with a plain black hilt, just the thing for shutting up sassy-ass hellbreed.

He choked, writhing, working the blade back and forth in the wound. The squishing sounds got worse.

“Mikhail had a bargain with this piece of garbage, too. I don’t know about either Karma, though. You seriously didn’t…” Something occurred to her then. She considered me, blue eyes gone cold. “Huh.”

“Breakfast!” a Were yelled from the other room. A ripple of appreciative sound went through the rest of the warehouse, a counterpoint to Perry’s gagging. The knife slid free on a gush of black ichor with a weird, opalescent sheen.

Perry was still grinning. His mouth worked, but he didn’t speak. The hole in his throat, his shell breached by the blessed silver loading the blade, would be slow to heal. But he still looked like a cat full of canary.

My stomach curled up against itself. “Mikhail.” I sounded like I’d been punched.

“We’ve got other problems.” Her chin jutted forward a little, indicating the hellbreed on the floor. Melisande Belisa still crouched. The pool of ichor almost touched her knees. “Like what the fuck he’s doing with a Sorrow.”

“He…” I swallowed hard, again. My stomach closed up even tighter, as if it would throw the mouthful of spit right back out. The Talisman rumbled unhappily on my chest, almost like Saul’s purr. Except Saul would comfort me, and this unsteady deep thrum wasn’t comforting at all. It was like the whine of a jet engine before something goes terribly wrong and the plane rediscovers gravity in a big way. “Met her before. A while ago.” A horrible supposition rose inside me like bad gas in a mine shaft.

“I’ll just bet.” The corner of Anya’s mouth lifted slightly. “Kismet…”

Perry knew Belisa from that case, the one with the bugfuck-crazy Sorrows Grand Mother and her job to shove a Chaldean Elder God into my resisting body. But what if, just what if, he’d known her before?

How had Mikhail met Belisa? I’d often wondered. Usually in the long, dark watches of the night, while I patrolled the city looking for trouble. I used to come back to it like peeling at a scab, until time had given me other things to think about.

Pieces of the puzzle slid together inside my head. I inhaled sharply, and Anya actually yelled as I leapt.

I was on Perry in a heartbeat, pistol-whipping him. His head bounced. Bone cracked, black fluid spraying, and even though he had a hole torn in his throat the hellbreed was making a queer chuffing noise that I realized was laughter.

He was laughing at me.

The world turned red. I was not flailing wildly. No, the instinct and expertise of years of murderous combat every night was filling me in an ice-burning torrent, and I hit to kill.

Chaos, the world turning over. Bright stars flashed across the red sheet my vision had become.

Someone had just punched me.

I hit the floor and wrestled with them. Whoever it was, they were unholy quick and strong, and they didn’t move like a ’breed. No claws, and someone was yelling my name. Someone I should recognize.

But first I had to kill him. They had my left hand locked, arm twisted bruising-hard, someone supple and dangerous as a python in my grasp. Suddenly more hands were clamping down on me, hard but not with the hurtful prick of hellbreed claws. I heard someone screaming obscenities in a ragged, cracked, unlovely voice, and realized it was me.

I also realized I was under a pile of Weres, and they were having trouble holding me down. Anya had dragged me off of Perry. I’d been trying to kill him by pistol-whipping him. Or with my bare hands.

Oh, shit. I’d lost it.

He’d finally found a way to make me react. Only it hadn’t been Perry, it had been her.

If she said it, it had to be true.

Oh, God. A wrecked scream rose up inside me, was throttled, died with a whining, hurt sound.

I struggled, but not with the hands holding me down. With myself. The scar was a brand, pressed into scorching flesh, laughing in a low, nasty whisper nobody else could hear. The abyss howled, and I pulled myself back from it with an effort that bowed me up into a hoop, every muscle locking down and my throat on fire, trying to scramble back from the howling madness opening up inside my head, inside my chest, inside everything that made me myself.

I made it. Just barely. Closer than I’d ever been.

I went limp. They sagged down on me, and I hoped I hadn’t hurt someone. “Anya?” I whispered. “OhGod. God, oh God.”

“Goddammit.” I heard the click of silver-plated handcuffs. “Is she all right?”

“We can’t sedate a hunter.” It sounded like Amalia. “She’ll burn right through—”

The very suggestion of sedation made me heave up from the floor again, struggling madly. They bore down, a tangle of arms and legs and more-than-human weight.

“Jill! Goddammit, Jill, calm down!” Anya, the snap of command under her sweet high-pitched voice. “Calm down or I will make you, hunter!”

She probably used that tone on her apprentices. It worked. I lay still as death. My eyes squeezed shut so hard tracers fired geometric shapes and whorls in the darkness behind my lids. The glow of the living beings on top of me poured in through the dumb meat of my left eyelid, my smart eye piercing the veils. Even when I tried to shut it out, I could not look away.

“Kismet.” Still with the crisp bite of authority. “Are you reasonable?”

No, I am not reasonable. This is not reasonable. I made some sort of noise, whether affirmation or denial I couldn’t tell, but it was apparently good enough.

One by one the Weres flowed away. They were all lionesses, their tawny hair falling in beautiful ripples and their eyes lambent. One of them was Amalia, and she leaned down, offering her hand. Muscle stood out under the bare, burnished skin of her upper arms. Her mouth was drawn tight, though, and her entire face was set and paler than a Were had any right to be.

I reached up as if drowning. Her warm fingers threaded through mine, and she hauled me to my feet. As soon as I had my balance she was away, stepping with the peculiar soft-footed glide of a cat Were, and a longing to see Saul shook me right down to my bootsoles.

Anya had Perry handcuffed on the floor. He was a mess. The urge to cross the intervening space and start kicking him with my own steel-toed boots rose, was repressed. Did not die away. The Talisman made a thin keening sound, and a curl of smoke rose to my nose. My aura crackled restlessly. Every piece of silver on me was warm and running with blue light.

“Jill.” Anya, very carefully. “Are you reasonable?”

I cleared my throat. Swallowed twice. Stared at the hamburger mess of Perry’s face. The grin was still there, white teeth flashing through meat and a chortling gurgle far back in his throat.

He had finally, after all this time, made me react.

“Jill.” Anya, again.

Hunters do not lie to each other. We can’t. It’s too dangerous. Not only that, but each hunter has descended into Hell at the end of their apprenticeship, trusting their teacher to hold the line and bring them out alive. If you ask an apprentice what the line’s made of, you’ll get varying theoretical answers. If you ask a hunter, you’ll only get one. It’s why we don’t even shade the truth.

It’s so simple, really. You can’t lie to someone else who has been loved like that. Loved so hard it pulls you out of Hell itself.

Mikhail. Bitter acid filled my mouth. “No.” The word stung my throat. “I am very fucking far from reasonable, Anya Devi.” Was that water on my cheeks? I was crying?

Why? God, why cry at a time like this? It had to be blood. I was bleeding salt and water from the knowledge.

“It’s true.” Was there a rock caught in her throat, too? Did she have to pull every word out of that raw bleeding place inside that makes us what we are? “I swear it’s true. I thought you knew.”

Idiots, Mikhail said. They think we do this for them. There is only one reason for to do what we do, milaya. It is for to quiet screaming in our own heads.

Hearing him in my head used to be a double-edged comfort. Now it tore at everything I’d ever believed about him.

“Is there anything else?” My hands were fists. I had no idea where my gun had gone, and that was bad. A hunter doesn’t lose track of something like that. I licked my scorch-dry lips. “Is there any fucking thing else someone forgot to tell me?”

“He must have had his rea—” She shut up as I looked at her. My blue eye was burning, and I knew there would be a pinprick of red in the depths of my pupil.

And I honestly do not know what I would have done if the loud, clanging chime of my doorbell hadn’t rung. It cut the tension like a knife, and every Were in the building tensed. Intuition hit me with a sick thump, right in the solar plexus.

I turned on my heel and ran for the door.