Heaven's Spite

24

The sun was sinking fast when my pager buzzed. I picked a sliver of glass out of my hair and sighed. Belisa sighed too, in the backseat.

I didn’t like that.

Of the four locations Perry had given me, three had evidence of Saul’s presence… and traps. I was now certain—the kind of cold certainty that settles on me halfway through a case—that the people who had lived in each place were all resting in the morgue.

The fourth locale, a dun-painted McMansion on the edge of the suburbs, had the carpet yanked up in the empty master bedroom, marks on the floor where a huge heavy object had been placed, probably brought in through the French doors. There were also five little guard-breed—little yappy things that looked like Lhasa Apsos with burning-red eyes. One of them had sunk vicious, needle-sharp teeth into my calf before I could break its neck. I would have worried about the sound of gunfire, except the mansion’s neighbors were far enough away that it didn’t matter.

Goddamn little dogs. Of course, if they were as large as German shepherds they’d be much more dangerous. They were just a demonic annoyance, especially if you had other ’breed or Traders to worry about.

But there hadn’t been anything bigger. I was chasing my own tail, goddammit.

I dug the pager out. They had to be moving Saul every few hours. I should have known they would, especially if Perry had any notion of where he was likely to be held. Now I was wishing I had cut him, and cut him deep.

That wouldn’t have led you to Saul. Of course, this isn’t doing a whole hell of a lot, either.

I found a Circle K and pulled into the lot. Glanced back at Belisa, made sure the collar was still snugly on. Here I was ferrying around a woman I should have killed on sight. God had a sick, sick sense of humor.

But I knew that. I’d known it since I was five years old.

“No sense,” I whispered to the pager’s glow. “This makes no fucking sense. As usual.”

But I was not quite being honest with myself. I had a bad bad feeling, down deep in my gut.

I dialed, it rang twice and she picked up. “Jill.”

“Hey, Badge. What do you have for me?”

She got right down to business. “You wanted to know about funky John Does in the last three weeks?”

“Yeah?” I tried not to feel like a bloodhound straining at the leash.

“Rosie and I have been digging all day. The short answer is, there’s none. But there’s something else.”

“Like what?” Her sense of the weird was almost as finely tuned as Carper’s had been. I shut my eyes at the thought of Carp, sleeping under a counterpane of green.

“Like disappearances up twenty percent. Rosie crunched some numbers. Adult disappearances are holding steady. It’s the kid ones that are accounting for the bump.”

“Huh.” If it was summer, the numbers might make sense. Kids get into trouble when school’s out, here as well as everywhere else.

But a spike of twenty percent? That was something. In winter too. “When did it start?”

“Let’s see… two weeks ago, missing persons reports did a sudden jump. Among kids too young to be runaways. We took a look at unsolved numbers in the last two weeks compared to unsolved over the last three years, and allowed for a certain percentage of retrievals—”

“Badge, you’re a wonder.” The sun slid below the horizon, and Santa Luz took its regular nightly breath before the plunge.

“Don’t I know it. And they’re up twenty percent, even accounting for variables in weather and unemployment. Does that help?”

Kind of. It tells me we are looking at a new high-level hellbreed in town, a hungry one. What were those evocation altars for? Just to keep me chasing my tail? To bring through someone else?

A sudden, blinding thought occurred to me. The victims I’d taken the bezoar from had to have been virgins, but it might have been a fluke or a crime of opportunity. In Anya’s territory, the virgin flesh might have been just to create extra punch in doing an evocation while the moon was wrong. Nothing pierces the walls of Hell like innocent flesh—and if they were attempting an evocation out of phase to bring someone else through, they’d need all the help they could get.

The pattern showed itself for a blinding moment. The scar buzzed on my wrist, etheric energy jolting up my arm. The bezoar, securely caged, twitched madly in my pocket as if someone was yanking at my coat. I looked up, and every sorcerous sense I had informed me shit was about to get ugly.

I didn’t need intuition to tell me that. All I had to do was look at the creeping dusklit shadows clustering up to my car. Those shadows had eyes like flat russet coins, and teeth that sparked with phosphorescence. They hunched and lunged through the shadows with the peculiar, crippled speed of the damned.

“Jill?” Badger said cautiously. “You still there?”

“Gotta go. Keep digging, give my best to Rosie. And thanks.” I hung up, drew my guns. One of the low twisted things leapt up on the trunk of the Pontiac, and the car’s springs groaned as it growled. Its muzzle twisted up, showing ancient, yellowed teeth. Its front paws were shaped like hands except for the two or three extra fingers, enlarged knuckles, and tarnished ivory claws. It dented the metal, and irrationally, all I could think of was the paint job.

“Son of a bitch,” I yelled, and launched myself forward. They melded out of the gathering dark, four of them, and spread out. Oh, this is gonna be fun.

At least I was sure I’d been poking around in the right way. They wouldn’t send rongeurdos—bonedogs—after me if I hadn’t been wandering around closer and closer to the truth.

The first one coiled down on its haunches, sprang with a deadly scraping of claws on concrete. I faded to the side, hit it twice at the top of its leap. It fell with a thump, steaming and scrabbling as blessed silver punched a hole in its shell and fragmented, filling it with poison.

The worst thing about the bonedogs is that they hunt in packs. The best thing? They die and stay down when you breach them with silver shot. And they never run by day.

Of course, that didn’t do me any good now.

As soon as I put that one down, another was leaping for me. I heard the little ding as the Circle K’s door opened, and I hoped nobody was coming out to take a look at the ruckus. You’d think even in the suburbs they would know to stay indoors when they hear gunshots.

My own leap was reflex, like a cat jumping back from a striking snake. I landed hard, already pitching to my right to draw them away from the convenience store’s entrance and whoever was stupid enough to be walking in or out. My boot flashed out, and the crunching shock of it meeting a ronguerdo’s face jolted all the way up to my hip, but I was already turning and shooting the other one with both guns. Pushing off, arms pulled close and angular momentum conserved enough to give me a spin. When I faced the other two my left hand held my whip instead of a gun, and I felt much more sanguine about the situation. The whip jingled as I shook it, assuring myself of free play. “All right, you sonsabitches.” My voice, a bright thread over the deep twisting Helletöng-accented growls. “Come get some.”

The Talisman thumped on my chest, its song of destruction hiking up a notch.

One hung back as the other slunk forward, head down and lips lifted over a slavering snarl. Yellow foam spattered, writhing into cracks in the pavement in long oily ropes.

I was bracing myself for the one in front to leap when the one behind flung its head up and howled.

The howl was answered. Eastward, another cry lifted into the night. Then, to the south, another one.

Oh, fuck. Kill them quick, Jill.

I swung forward. Hip leading for the whip work, the force uncoiling through me and flinging out through my hand, gun speaking at the same moment as the bonedog jerked aside to avoid jingling razor-sharp silver. The second, his duty done, leapt too, but I’d gotten the first right through his broad canine skull. He dropped like a stone and I had the last one to worry about.

The last one was the smartest. He looked at me, those eyes widening and turning bright crimson instead of a low punky russet glow. The sky was indigo now. In winter, night falls quick and hard in the desert.

The thing scrabbled backward, turned tail, and ran.

I leapt for my car. Fast as I am, I can’t follow a bonedog on foot. With a V8 under me, though, I can track it as far as possible.

If the bezoar was reacting, I could track it even farther. That masked son of a bitch might have survived, but he wouldn’t survive what I was about to do to him. I could find out who he was really working for as a bonus.

But I thought I knew. And the knowledge chilled me all the way down to the bone.

You’ve gone too fucking far this time, you son of a bitch.

I piled into the car. She roused with a purr, and her tires smoked as I spun the wheel. I let off the brake and peeled out. There was an oof from the backseat, but I couldn’t do more than glance in the rearview and get a jumble of shadowy impressions, a flash of pale-copper flesh and the chain jingling. A merry, Christmas-like sound, but if you knew the real story behind Santa Claus you’d probably never want to hear sleigh bells again.

Hellbreed aren’t the only things that like tender little children. And don’t even get me started on the Tooth Fairy.

The bonedog was just visible down the street, nipping smartly around to the right. I gunned the engine and the Pontiac leapt for it, happy to be going fast again. The knocking in the upper registers of the engine’s roar was even more pronounced, I was really going to have to nail that down—

I checked the rearview again. Shadows ran like ink on wet paper. Little spots of red in the distance, loping along two by two.

More bonedogs.

The accelerator was already jammed against the floor.

Now it was a race.