Heaven's Spite

26

Rule number two of fighting ’breed: keep moving. Even if your ribs are broken and your entire body feels like it’s been passed through a meat grinder, don’t slow down. Slowing down means dying.

What little I could see of the masked ’breed’s face was a ruin of scar tissue. Guess Belisa hadn’t put him down for good, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. I bounced like a jackrabbit, whip uncurling, knew he’d dodge, and swung back, my leg flashing out to kick a lean dark cowled ’breed in the face. The shock jolted all the way through me, but it did knock the son of a bitch away and into a snarling mass of ’breed vying to take Perry’s guts out the hard way. Including Julius, but Perry seemed to be doing all right and I had all I could handle in front of me.

I landed on the twisted cage to the right and snapped a glance down. It took a moment for it to register, because I immediately had to hop aside, my whip flying out again and my gun speaking with a sharp crackling roar. The recoil grated in my shoulder. The scar writhed on my wrist like a live thing. I landed on the other cage, and the roaring of the thrashing hellbreed kicked up a notch. They hit the altar squarely, and the pale egg of etheric force began to spin.

That’s not good. So not good. But I couldn’t worry about that, because the masked ’breed was stalking me again, and this time I was sure he wasn’t a copy. He was just too goddamn fast, and he had his little tabi booties on, the bastard.

And to top it all off, the cages were empty.

What the hell? But I had no time, because Perry was thrown back like a meteorite, a streak of black ichor and the incandescence of pure unholy rage trailing him. He hit the concrete so hard he dented it, and the crack was loud enough to drown out everything else.

Julius snarled and leapt on him, I shot the masked ’breed twice, and began to think of how I could get out of here while Perry was still ass-deep in angry ’breed. If Saul and Gilberto weren’t here—but there was that pale egg of light needing to be dealt with, and the evocation altar too. Good luck calling up banefire while dealing with the Great Masked Ninja in Pajamas.

There was only one thing to do.

This is going to hurt.

Tensing, stupid body bracing itself for a hit it knew was coming, I leapt from the top of the cage, my boots skidding on the slick iron. Falling, right for the pale egg. The silver I carried, not to mention my hard thick exorcist-trained aura, would disrupt it. I’d be thrown like popcorn, again. I’d been doing a lot of that lately.

I might also lose an arm or a leg. Or more. Details, details. But I’d slam the door closed on the toes of the ’breed trying to come through, and that was worth the risk.

It’s always worth the risk.

I hung in the air for a long crystalline second. The body was still flinching, like that was going to change the outcome. The rest of me kept firing, the masked ’breed having realized what I was going to do and spitting a stream of curses like rancid lasers at me. They were too slow. I was going to make it.

But the world paused, the way it will do when something truly significant happens. There, in the door I’d kicked in, a pair of familiar figures: one male, one female. The female had a vacant smile, her black eyes wide and hungry as collapsed neutron stars. The collar around her slim neck had rubbed through her skin, biting into her shoulders as well, and blood slid down her tattered blue silk. The Chaldean wasn’t healing her fast enough.

The other was the caretaker, his filmed eyes wide and the clarity around him brighter than the fluorescents. He reached up, slowly, and his clever thin fingers touched the locking pin holding the chain to the collar. Hellbreed hung in the air, their motion arrested, and I saw—No, I thought I saw…

No, I saw. I saw the light shining through the caretaker’s façade of mute blind scarring, his hair turning a feathery gold—and the things behind him, reaching up in spires of snowy white, what were they? Wings, but not of any terrestrial bird. Glowing, in a way that seemed oddly tip-of-the-tongue familiar.

My blue eye burned, a twinge of acid fire spearing back into my brain. I could not look away from the light, dear God, the light pouring through him like dawn breaking, a dawn that was not tired or old…

What the hell?

The pin holding the chain to the collar clicked free. The chain slithered, clashing all the way down, but the collar stayed put. Melisande Belisa inhaled sharply, and hurtful intelligence came back into her black eyes. She looked across the confused jumble of ’breed doing their best to kill each other, and I swear to God I saw an awful sanity in her gaze.

The caretaker’s lips were moving. He whispered in her ear, his eyes unfilmed for a long terrible moment, piercing blue casting shadows against her face. The shadows of Chaldean moving over her aura flinched back from that blue glow.

The chain finished hitting the floor with a slither, and she was already moving. Time made a snapping sound, like a huge rubber band breaking, and the noise of an almighty huge fight broke over me like a wave. My hair blew back on a breeze from nowhere, my coat flapped, and something out of the ordinary had indeed happened.

Because instead of falling into the oval of light and cutting off the door between here and Hell, I landed with bonecracking force in front of the altar, a short howl escaping my abused lips. And the masked ’breed was on me in a heartbeat. I shot him twice, but he was too close.

Now it was time for knife work.

He tried to grab my head and slam it into the altar’s base. I wriggled away, and he’d taken so much damage he was moving slowly, at least for him. I jerked my leg up, the bony part of my knee sinking into what passed for his groin and meeting something weirdly squishy. That was only a distraction, though, because my largest knife had sunk in to the hilt, only the crossguard stopping it from vanishing into his belly. I wrenched it back and forth, the reek of hellbreed guts spilling free assaulting me. Hot noisome fluids bathed my hand.

The noise was incredible. Now I knew what happened when a Sorrow went up against a ’breed. It wasn’t pretty. But between her and Perry, Julius might have a lot of trouble, and if I could just get up—

The assassin slumped atop me, corruption racing through his tissues. His fingers flexed, and I half-swallowed a scream. His claws grated between my ribs, and I was losing yet more blood. The scarring on his coppery face cracked apart, fine noxious dust bleeding out.

That meant he was dying. Thank God. I’d worry about the next ’breed to step up and start committing assassinations when I survived this.

If I survived this.

Get up, Jill.

But there was a problem with that. My body would not obey me. I blinked warm wetness out of my eyes, every muscle tensing and the scar a cicatrice of fierce heat on my wrist. There was a horrible draining sensation, worse than any blood loss I’d ever felt. A warm lassitude spread up my ankles.

I stared up at the pale egg. It was spinning now, filaments of it reaching out and snagging the flying bits of curse as they got too close. Each little bat-flapping thing went into the hungry maw. That was where most of the nasty psychic force of the Hill had gone, too. A nice snack for whoever was waiting under Hell’s dry screaming skies, probably impatiently tapping a clawed and twisted foot.

He would have to step through to claim that snack, though.

And he can’t do that if you get up and stop him. So DO it!

Swearing at myself didn’t work. But my body twitched. Something hit the floor next to me—a hellbreed claw, ripped free of its owner’s body and smoking with corruption. It twisted and flexed, wet, rancid dust pouring out of it in veined streams.

Will and life roared back into me. There was an odd ringing in my ears. My body suddenly obeyed, jerking up off the floor. A split second later, something huge barreled for me and I leapt aside instinctively, knife in one hand and my whip flashing out. It hit the bleeding mass of Julius squarely, and his resultant roar was a wall of warm air pushing me back. My boots slipped in greasy crud—bits of hellbreed rained down, plopping obscenely and still twitching as they hit.

A blue blur streaked by. Belisa, her battered feet slapping the stone and her mouth a rictus of effort, leapt with fluid effortless authority onto Julius. She clawed at him, screaming in the heavy consonant-laden mess of Chaldean, the bruising of the parasite on her aura turned as dark and sonorous as mountain thunder. Perry, just as battered and wearing a mad death’s-head grin, was right behind her. They descended on the hapless ’breed, and I snapped a glance up.

The room that had been full of Hell’s citizens was now an abattoir. Rotting bits of ’breed were everywhere. My breath came in short, hard sobs; the scar went back to chuckling as it tasted the death and misery riding the air. It sent a jolt up my arm, and the terrible draining sensation swirled away.

Julius howled. Both of them were ripping at him, like a pair of wolves at a carcass. His head smashed against the altar, right where mine had been a few seconds ago. Bile burned the back of my throat, I retched silently and pointlessly. Belisa made a guttural noise, the chanting in Chaldean hitting a vicious peak and the collar flashing with deep gold, and she finally grabbed Julius’s head in her strong slender hands.

I was expecting a quick movement and the green-stick crack of a breaking neck. But no. Her flexible thumbs dug and gripped, and she popped his eyes like two overripe grapes. The ’breed’s spine arced up into a hoop, his heels drumming the concrete, and corruption raced through his tissues.

If I’d eaten lately, it would have come up in a tasteless rush. As it was, I retched again and stumbled back, slipping and sliding. The floor was awash.

Perry was suddenly there, resolving out of thin air with a sound like nasty laughter trailing him. “Enjoying the show, my dear?” His ribs heaved, but he didn’t sound at all out of breath. “What a pleasant little interlude. I’ve waited to do that for so long.”

“P-P-P—” My lips refused to shape his name. I wasn’t looking at him. I was looking past him, at the spinning egg. A hairline crack had appeared in its center, a thin line of darkness.

Melisande Belisa threw back her head and howled. It was an animal’s cry, except for the all-too-human rage tinting it.

The hairline crack widened. My right hand swept down, sheathed my largest knife, and was heading for my gun when Perry grabbed my wrist and squeezed, grinding the small bones together. “Oh, no you don’t. She’s expendable, my darling. I still have plans for—”

My left fist, braced with the whip handle, got him in the belly. It was a good solid punch, and that did make him lose all his air. My other fist crashed into his face and his head snapped back. I kicked him, too, and the Talisman made a rustling, roaring sound.

I hadn’t used it, had I? No, if I’d used it this whole place would be a crater and the door to Hell would be busted wide open. And yet…

Perry went down. He slid back along the floor, fetching up against concrete with another stunning sound.

And the pale, spinning oval over the altar…

Cracked.