Heaven's Spite

27

Belisa howled, a guttural, abused scream. A hairline crack, darker than the pit of a black hole, zigzagged through the spinning egg of light. It widened, just a little, and something white showed.

The Sorrow rose. She cast a glance back over her shoulder, her face slack and terribly graven. Bruises crawled over her skin, the shadows of Chaldean sorcery doing what they could to ameliorate the damage. But she was in bad shape, bleeding all over, her tangled hair smoking at each knot.

Each inch of silver on me ran with blue flame. My head was full of screaming noise.

“Kill,” Perry hissed, from where I’d kicked him. “Kill it now!”

I lifted my gun slowly. It was a terrible dream, fighting through syrup, my muscles full of lead.

Belisa’s chin dipped wearily. She pitched forward just as the egg stopped spinning.

The thing that slid its malformed hand through the barrier between this world and Hell twitched. I heard myself screaming, sanity shuddering aside from the sight. They do not dress when they are at home, and when they come through and take on a semblance of flesh it’s enough to drive any ordinary person mad. Wet salt trickles slid down from my eyes, slid from my nose and ears.

They were not tears.

There was a rushing, the physical fabric of our world terribly assaulted, ripping and stretching. My screams, terrible enough to make the Hill shudder all the way down to its misery-soaked foundations. Perry, hissing in squealgroan Helletöng, and under it all, so quiet and so final, Mikhail’s voice from across a gulf of years. Long nights spent turning over everything about his death, remembering him, all folding aside and compressing into what he would say if he was here. Or maybe just the only defense my psyche had against the thing struggling to birth itself completely.

Now, Mikhail said. Kill now, milaya. Do not hesitate.

My teacher’s killer was in the way.

The scar crunched on my wrist. I squeezed the trigger. Both triggers, and I saw the booming trail of shock waves as the bullets cut air. Belisa’s fingers had turned to claws, Chaldean spiking the soup of noise, and she tore at the not-quite-substantial flesh of the thing. Blue light crawled over her as if she wore silver, the same blue that the caretaker’s eyes had flashed. The shadows of the Chaldean parasite flinched aside, for some incomprehensible reason.

I was still screaming as the bullets tore through her and the egg as well. The collar made a zinging, popping noise, the golden runes shutterclicks of racing, diseased light. Her body shook and juddered as she forced the thing behind the rip in the world back, and the physical fabric of the place humans call home snapped shut with a sound like a heavy iron door slamming. The bristling, misshapen appendage thumped down to the floor.

Belisa’s fingers, human again, plucked weakly at the collar. She was a servant of the gods who were here long before demons, the inimical forces the shadowy Lords of the Trees trapped in another place long ago. It was a Pyrrhic victory; the Imdarák didn’t survive, either. And the Sorrows are always looking to bring their masters back. The ’breed? Well, they’re always looking to bring more of their kind. It’s like two different conventions fighting over the same hotel.

If anyone could have slammed a door between here and Hell shut, it was a Sorrow.

But why? And the caretaker, what was he—

My knees folded. I hit the ground. Henderson Hill whispered around me like the end of a bell’s tolling, reverberations dying in glue-thick air.

Oh, no.

Belisa folded over. I’d emptied a clip. Sorrows can heal amazingly fast, but she was probably exhausted after all the fun and games.

Her knees hit the concrete in front of the altar. Blood flowered, spattered on the floor. She shook her head, tangled hair swaying. The golden runes on the collar snuffed out, one by one.

“Ahhhhh.” It was a long satisfied sigh, escaping Perry’s bleeding lips. “Oh, yes. Yessssssssss.”

The scar drew up on my wrist and began to ache. This wasn’t the usual burning as I yanked etheric energy through it. I tore my eyes from Belisa’s slumped form and turned my right wrist up.

The print of Perry’s lips was not a scar, now. It was black, as if the flesh itself was rotting, and it pulsed obscenely. As I watched the edges frayed, little blue vein-maps crawling under the surface of my flesh.

And I knew why. I could have shot around her.

But I’d chosen not to.

Melisande Belisa’s body hit the floor too, next to the swiftly rotting hellbreed appendage. The last rune on the collar winked out. There was a terrible mortal stench—even a Sorrow’s sphincter relaxes when death takes them. The blood spread out from her body in little tendrils. Soon it would make a pool. A lake.

The tendrils made a screaming face for a moment, traced on the cracked and blackened floor, before a wash of bright-red blood poured over and obscured it. I sagged, my mouth open and the gun falling out of my right hand.

“At last.” Perry, on his feet now. He danced a little capering jig, and I saw one of his shoes had been lost somewhere. His sock was pale cream, and absolutely filthy. “A hunter of my very own. My darling one, my Kiss, we are going to—”

I don’t know why he forgot I had another gun in my left hand. I raised it, and the shot took him right in the chest.

The scar shrieked with agony. But each time he’d fiddled with it over the years, each time he’d used it to fuck with my nervous system, he was training me to disregard it. My right hand curled up into a seizure-lock, but the left was fine. I got him twice more in the chest before he snarled and was on me, knocking the gun away. His free hand closed around my throat, and my back hit the floor. He snarled into my face, his breath an exhalation of spoiled honey, and I heard the buzz of dead metallic flies in a chlorine-painted bottle, bashing at the sides as they tried to escape.

I fought for leverage, but he was too quick and I was exhausted. And damned besides. The knowledge beat inside my head like a drum, robbing me of the clarity of a hunter’s reactions. All I had left was…

… what?

Saul. It was like breaking water and taking a breath. “You. You have him. All the time, it was you.”

He’d played both me and Julius. The rest of the pattern came clear now. He hadn’t been trying to bring a higher-up hellbreed through; he’d been stringing along the other ’breed trying to bring Argoth out. And Perry had set out to kill his immediate superior with my help as well—or with Belisa’s. The whisper of Argoth was to keep me chasing my tail while he worked me into a corner—with the Talisman to knock me off balance and the revelation of Mikhail’s bargain to keep me there. It was all a game, every set of obstacles balanced against the others and working at cross-purposes.

The prize wasn’t any power or position game among ’breed. He wasn’t playing to get any higher in the hierarchy.

No. I was the prize. And I’d fallen right into his trap.

He’d won. At last.

“Oh, darling. Not personally, of course.” He leaned in and sniffed, taking a good lungful. It couldn’t be pleasant—reek of hellbreed death, blood and human death, corruption and whatever foulness was spread all over me. “This has been so entertaining. And there’s more to come.” He grinned, a terrible grimace. “Via Dolorosa, my darling. At dawn. Don’t disobey—or that black rot will start to spread. You won’t like it.”

I heaved up, but he shoved me back down. The extra strength from the scar had deserted me now. I was only weakly human, hunter or no, and my body started reminding me I’d been abusing it far past the norm, even for me.

Perry leaned forward. His tongue snaked between his bloodless lips, wet and cherry-red. A drop of clear liquid hung trembling at the tip. Little bits of blue hellfire danced and dazzled in whatever that liquid was, and I was suddenly very certain I didn’t want it touching my skin.

The drop slid back up his tongue, hellfire crackling in the spaces between the scales. The rough tongue tip touched my cheek, flicking along the skin. It caressed my jawbone, slid down to touch the pulse beating a frantic tattoo in my throat. Rasping, dryly.

It reeled back up between his lips with a snap. The Hill shuddered again, and I exhaled. My right hand was still cramped up, my fingers an absurd claw.

But my left curled around a knife hilt. I braced myself slowly, tensing muscle by recalcitrant muscle.

“Come see me at dawn, my darling.” He breathed in my face again, a hot dry draft from a desert of powdered bones. “I’ve waited for this so long. Best savored, don’t you agree?”

I exploded into motion, slashing. But he was already gone, glass shattering and his footsteps a rapid light beat. The Hill shuddered, settling in itself, and little sparkles began as my aura pushed against the psychic soup spilling into the nerve center of the hill like wine into a glass. The force that had been gathered, held to open a gap and feed a fresh hungry ’breed, was exploding out from confinement.

I had to get out of here.

I rolled to one side. Pushed myself up. A single drop of blood fell from my nose. It hit the concrete, flowered into a star.

I looked at the black traceries defiling the clean red. Melisande Belisa’s body still slumped, the bruising of Chaldean settling in to do its work of erasing her from the world. They were dead the moment they took vows. Most of them had no choice, they were born into the Houses—a Mother impregnated by a soldier drone, bred like cattle.

Had I been aiming at her?

Why do you ask, Jill? You know you were.

Scrambled to my feet. My right hand relaxed slightly, fingers shaking out. I felt a plucking at the scar, but nothing else. No etheric energy swelled through it to mend my body, nothing. It might as well have been a rotting lump of flesh.

That’s exactly what it is, Jill. The truth of what I’d done hit home. I’d solved two problems at once, but it hadn’t been clean vengeance. I’d killed her because the entire time she’d been in the car, she’d been wearing on my nerves. It didn’t matter that she was Perry’s servant in all this.

I had killed her while she was helping to seal the rip in the world. And I’d done it not because she was a threat, but because I couldn’t stand to have Mikhail’s killer breathing one more moment.

I had damned myself.

The Talisman was a warm weight on my chest. It hadn’t turned on me yet. How long would it last?

Just long enough, I promised myself.

My left hand could still make a base for the banefire. I concentrated, hard, as the flaming blue wisps fought me in a way they never had before. But they came, moaning and crying, and they burned. Bubbling, blistering the skin.

That sacred fire burned me.

I cast the banefire. It hit the altar and roared up in a sheet of cleansing flame. I could have stayed and let it take me too.

But I had things to do.