Heaven's Spite

25

A long, looping trail of rubber came to an abrupt stop. Something had blown in the engine. It didn’t matter—I bailed out, not caring that Belisa had rolled forward and was now half on the floor in the back.

She could stay there. I’d settle her hash after I settled Perry’s, when this was done.

The gates were shaking like epileptic hands. They banged together, and Henderson Hill rose behind them.

But something was wrong. It should have been a starlit sky, the waxing moon already risen like a yellow-silver coin. Instead, the vault of heaven was black, the stars blotted out and an unnatural dark covering my city like an old, veined hand.

Oh, this isn’t going to be fun.

I timed it just right, plunged between the gates. The Hill closed around me, I didn’t have time to slow down and see if it was going to try to make things tricky. Besides, something else was wrong—the bath of ice-cold prickles was much weaker than it should have been. I should have been hopping one step ahead of Henderson Hill’s voices, sparking off the thick sludge of etheric bruising.

Instead, the ghosts rushed at me in rotting cheesecloth veils. Their mouths were open in distorted screams. They poured through and past as if I was an empty door, splashing against the threshold where the bonedogs pulled up short, snarling.

The bezoar went nuts inside my pocket, straining against the silver cage and the leather. Buzzing like an angry bumblebee. A really big one.

One of the bonedogs put a paw over the threshold and snatched it back with a Helletöng-laden squeal, like metal rubbing against itself in an empty, echoing stadium. The Hill’s ghosts trembled on the edge of visibility, twisting together in boneless contortions to make a weird flowing screen.

A long black smear was the remains of the bonedog I’d chased in here. It bubbled, the eyes rolling free like weird crystalline fruits, the nerve roots decaying strings of quartz.

Now that’s weird. Back here again, just like a bad dream. And why does it feel so strange, Jill? Oh, this is great. Just fucking great.

I didn’t stop to ask myself why the Hill’s ghosts would be holding the bonedogs back. I just dug in my pocket for the bezoar while lengthening my stride, and bolted for the lowering bulk of Henderson Hill.

The sky was still featurelessly black. I kicked in a boarded-up door, the bezoar rattling and straining when I shoved it back in my pocket. I found myself staring at a hall with a slight upward slope. This was the building on the north side of the quad, a huge brooding monstrosity. It vibrated with agony and fear, but something was muting the force of the Hill’s terrible cold unlife.

The doors marching down the hall jerked and shuddered. Normally they’d be opening and closing hungrily, and the entire hall would stretch to infinity, a trick of light and shade. There was a long smear on the floor, some dark weeping fluid, and I hopped over it. Making a lot of noise. They have to know I’m coming.

That’s okay, an iron voice inside me replied. Get Saul, kick their asses, and close up whatever door they’re opening to Hell. One two three, easy as can be.

I should have checked the entire Hill for a secondary evocation site. Either that or they’d come back, since this was too good a snack to resist for whoever they were bringing through. But goddammit, physical ’breed didn’t come up here!

Unless the reward—or the threat by their master on the other side of the walls separating worlds—was greater than the cost.

Up the hall, avoiding the heavy doors as they sluggishly swung wide to catch at the unwary, the bezoar straining against the leather of my coat and sending up a thin keening sound. I smelled smoke, the Talisman rumbling against my chest, and when I reached the top of the slope and the circular hall around the huge operating theater opened up, I was prepared for the crosscurrent, a psychic torrent raging around the still, horrible eye of where a great many of the old Hill’s worst excesses had gone down.

I was so braced for it, as a matter of fact, that I almost fell over when it didn’t show up. I actually stopped for a moment, braced in the threshold.

The hall should have been alive with screaming faces, weird noises, and a strong current of not-quite air pushing against every surface. Instead, it was a dingy, institutional hallway, curving out of sight on either end. My breath still puffed out in a freezing cloud, and my hair still stirred on a not-quite breeze.

But the roaring weirdness was gone.

Shit, shit shit—I hooked around the corner, running for the secondary door to the operating theater.

The one they used to wheel the bodies out through.

There were windows, long narrow strips of chicken-wire-laced glass up too high for anyone to peer through them. Maybe they were psychological. They ran with diseased blue light, the corners dripping fat little blobs of it to sizzle against the chipped layers of yellow paint. The scar sent a jolt of agonizing pain up my arm, but my hand didn’t waver, freighted with the gun. My boot soles pounded on the water-damaged linoleum. Each step seemed to take a lifetime, but I knew I was moving much faster than an ordinary human—or even an ordinary hunter.

I skidded, turning, and hit the secondary door with megaton force. The Talisman’s thrumming went up a full octave, and my aura began to sparkle with little sea-urchin specks of light. The door exploded, steel flying as shrapnel—

—and I was through, rolling, coming up with both guns and taking in the lay of the land.

The operating theater was concave, with two or three concrete terraces that used to hold audiences back in the days of electroshock and experimentation. The space at the bottom of the bowl was wide enough for two iron cages, one of them twisted and battered a bit, and an altar. The fluorescent glare of the lights blinked and buzzed, and the entire place was just full of robed, cowled hellbreed.

I shot the first one and didn’t have time to check the cages. Because between them, right where the central operating table would have sat, was an evocation altar—a pulsing blot of blackness and corruption. And atop it was a pale spinning oval of light.

It was an egg, and if they kept feeding it etheric force it would crack, and when it did the walls between here and elsewhere would gap just a little, and something would slip through.

Something old and hungry that Jack Karma had sent back to Hell during a firestorm in Dresden, decades ago.

The ’breed exploded into motion. I’d already put down two of them, one with a head shot and another with a glancing blow. Now all I had to do was stay one step ahead of them, and not shoot whoever was in the cages.

One of the hellbreed screamed, Helletöng like metal and glass buildings rubbing each other during an earthquake, and the curse hit me squarely. Right in the gut. The world turned over, I flew up toward the ceiling, but that was okay—twisting in midair, shaking the remains of the ’breed’s curse like so much water from a duck’s back, still firing. The fragments of hellbreed nastiness flew free, flapping their leathery wings, so many pieces of shadow careening through space. Momentum bled, etheric force crystallizing around me, and I hit the ceiling a glancing blow. Old warped glass fixtures shattered.

Falling, then. I was going to hit hard, braced myself, still firing. By the time I crunched into one of the concrete terraces with a terrible snapping sound, I had my whip free. It slithered, hit the floor, and my ribs ran with agonizing pain. The scar burned, burrowing into my flesh like acid, and the ’breed leapt for me, hanging in the air with his robe and cowl fluttering, arms up, claws extended, and his legs drawn up like a spider flicked into a candle flame.

Split-second reflex was all I had. The whip’s end was airborne, my side giving a hot flare of spiked agony as muscles pulled against broken ribs. I caught him as he was already heading down from the apex of his leap, the other ’breed hanging back for some reason, and that was bad news.

He was slight and dark, with a handsome bladed face the flechettes tore across with a smart crackling jingle. Skipping aside, reaching the next terraced step up and my legs bending and tensing, flung up with a leap that was half instinct and half desperation. If they were avoiding me, waiting for this guy to finish me off, he was probably a Big Cheese. I had never seen him before, which meant he wasn’t local.

Which, ten to one, told me I was looking at Perry’s boss, the one trying to bring Argoth through. He did look kind of like a handsomer Buster Keaton, right down to the pouting lips.

And since Perry could produce hellfire in the blue spectrum, his boss was likely to be more badass than one tired hunter could handle.

For a brief moment I thought of unleashing the Talisman. But with the spinning egg over the evocation altar hungrily grabbing at all the power it could find, that was a monumentally bad idea.

Dammit.

Julius howled, and the windows shattered, blown outward. I gained my footing on the uppermost tier of concrete, a few busted wooden seats to my left and clear running room to my right. Shook the whip free as my ribs fused together with heavy red pain, the scar like hot lead whittling deeper and deeper as I aimed. One shot, God, come on, one shot, give me a good shot here—

I pointed and squeezed, praying.

I hit him. I knew I hit him, too—his sleek head snapped back and black ichor flew.

But then his chin came down, the hurt sealing itself over and the hard carapace of a hellbreed flowing like so much molten sugar, and he hissed at me, baring his pearly, shark-sharp teeth.

I heard a high nasty giggle from one of the watching ’breed, and braced myself. This was going to hurt, and I was down to four shots left in the extended clip.

Goddammit.

The lights—and who the hell changed the bulbs in here, anyway?—flickered. Glass rained down, and the bits of curse flapped in lethargic circles. The scar gave an agonizing wet crunch of pain, and I hissed in a breath, broken ribs twitching with pain. Every hellbreed in the operating room crouched except Julius, whose blue eyes widened—

—before more glass shattered. Perry resolved out of thin air and knocked him on his ass. The screen of bland normality over Perry had dropped, and for a heartbeat or two I saw underneath—the thing that inhabited his shell snarled and crouched before leaping down toward the altar, on a trajectory that would take him right to where Julius was landing.

Go figure. I was actually not unhappy to see him. Despite the fact that he was playing me and his boss off against each other for some reason.

My fingers moved mechanically, tucking the whip and reloading. I was almost able to aim again before one of the other ’breed decided to take care of what the boss couldn’t, and as I threw myself away toward the wooden chair, I saw the mask fluttering over the lower half of his wax-white face and knew who I was facing.

Oh yeah. This just keeps getting better.