Hunter's Prayer

Chapter Ten

A very slumped in the booth, tapping his long fingers on the glass-topped table. Directly over him, Humphrey Bogart stared somberly out of a framed print. Curly brown hair fell in Ave’s face, over sad brown eyes; he looked like a handsome little mournful beagle. Despite that, he was quick and ruthless during exorcisms, seeming to come alive only when a particular Possessor or arkeus was giving him trouble, or the victim started to thrash. Of all the exorcists I knew, he was the one who came closest to being a hunter, if only because of the sheer nail-biting joy he took in skating the edge of danger.

We are all adrenaline junkies, really. You have to be. Hunting is 95 percent boredom-laced waiting punctuated with the occasional bursts of sheer and total terror. No middle ground.

Ave’s badge hung on a chain around his neck; he had shrugged out of his motorcycle jacket and was staring at his fingertips like he had bad news.

I was really getting a rotten feeling about this.

I slid into the booth, Saul right next to me. “Hey, baby.” I gave a smile, but Ave didn’t grin back. Not even a glimmer of his usual sleepy good humor. “Wow, looks grim.”

Vixen swished her hips up to the table, her sleek brown hair clinging to her head like an otter’s. “Hey.” She plunked down three Fat Tires, her lip lifting as she glared at me, then smiled at Saul. He, as usual, looked supremely unconcerned.

She sighed, turned on her heel, and her tartan skirt ticked back and forth as she switched away with a Were’s grace.

“In heat again, I see,” Saul murmured, and I choked on my first sip of beer, the laugh bubbling up.

Avery didn’t even crack a slight smile. I sighed. “So what’s up, Ave?”

He finally shifted, picking up his beer and tipping a sarcastic salute to Saul. “Hey, furboy.”

“Hey, skinman.” Saul’s tone was even, chill.

“I heard something.” Avery addressed this to me.

“Yeah?” I waited, rolling my next sip of beer around in my mouth. Stifled a small pleasant burp; it tasted of grilled onions. At least I had the memory of dinner to get me through this. Whatever this was.

“One of my stoolies; he’s a drunk. But he picks stuff up—it’s amazing. He manages to get around. Anyway, he knows someone who saw something.” Avery produced a white square of paper, held between his fingers like a card trick. “And the worst thing is, I believe him.”

“What did he see?” And what the fuck does this have to do with anything? I shifted uneasily, the leather of my pants rubbing uncomfortably against the vinyl seat.

“Guy’s called Robbie the Juicer. He saw them dumping Baby Jewel last night. Black van, no license plate. Said there were four of them, one looked to be a woman, and two men. The last one was… he said it was big, and it stank, and it threw the body like it weighed nothing.”

Huh. I absorbed this. “Big. And stinky.”

“Yeah. He said it looked like an ape. Like it was furry.” He darted a look at Saul. “Could it be a rogue Were? No offense, understand, I just thought I should ask.”

It was a good question, considering what he’d been told. “A rogue Were would hide the bodies,” I said, slowly. The memory of the last rogue to hit Santa Luz was far enough away that I could consider the notion without a gut-clenching burst of slick-palmed fear. “Wouldn’t work with anyone else, that’s why they’re rogue. And wouldn’t eat the organs unless it was starving; they like muscle-meat first. Who is this witness, and where was he?”

“My stoolie said something about a baseball diamond; the witness is homeless and sometimes sleeps in the dugout. He heard the van’s engine and looked out; the van sat there for a while and he decided to go take a look.” He offered the square of white paper. “Here’s his name and vitals, and a list of the places he usually hangs out. He’s scared to death.”

“He should be. This is nothing to mess with.” I took the paper; it was thin and innocent against my fingers. “Thanks, Avery.” Christ, I bet I’m not going to sleep for a while. Behind my eyes, the vision of the edge of the park and the baseball diamond flashed, and I cautiously decided it was possible. The dugout was at an angle and it was extremely possible someone hidden in there could have seen something. It was just slightly possible someone hidden in there could have been unremarked, which was the truly incredible part. Whoever this Robbie Juicer was, he’d probably used up his entire life’s worth of luck.

Avery was decent, after all. He looked up, at my Were. “I’m sorry, Saul. I just—Christ. This thing’s awful. There’s talk going around.”

My ears perked. “What kind of talk?”

“Talk of a bounty on Weres. Someone’s saying that this is a rogue Were, and why shouldn’t the rest of them suffer for it? And there’s talk about you too, Jill, that you’re marked and it’s only a matter of time before the damned drag you back to Hell.”

“Marked. By who?” I’ve been marked all my life, Avery. But if he was hearing whispers on the nightside, little bits of rumor from the occult shops and not-so-human stoolies that kept on the exorcists’ good side, it could only mean bad trouble.

“I dunno. But you hear shit, you know. Something big is going down, and I can’t get more than whispers.” He hunched his shoulders, looking miserable. “You just be careful. We can’t afford to lose you. Or your furry friend there.”

Well, at least that was something. “Guess not.” I bumped Saul with my elbow, but gently. Just to let him know I was there. He was still crowding me, a little closer than usual. Taking comfort in closeness. “We’ve got Sorrows adepts in town, Ave. At least one. I pulled an utt’huruk out of a kid the other day and there was a Neophym who gurgled something about chutsharak before biting his poison tooth. You know that term?”

“I never was good at that prehistoric shit.” He shook his brown head, curls falling in his eyes. “I thought you didn’t let the Sorrows in.”

“I don’t. When I find their bolthole I’m going to burn them. Just watch yourself. You hear anything that sounds like Chaldean, you run.”

“You bet. Hey, be easy on this witness. He’s not bolted too tight, I guess. And he doesn’t want any police static, or I woulda met him and brought him to you.”

Go easy? I’m an easygoing gal. “That goes without saying.” I lifted my beer bottle and he lifted his, we clinked the glass together. He suddenly looked a lot easier about the whole thing. “I’ll be gentle, I promise.”

“Yeah, right.” His color began to come back. “Sure you will.”

I could almost feel my eyebrow raise. “You’re a cynic, Avery. One day that’s going to catch up to you.” I lifted my beer again, and took a long hard swallow.

It tasted a little more sour than I liked. Or that could have been the taste of bad luck in my mouth.

Instead of research, we hit the street looking for Robbie the Juicer, the nervous witness. It was a cold night, clouds moving in from the river but not fast enough to give us rain before five or six in the morning; the hard points of braver stars pierced the veil of night and orange citylight. Outside the city limits, out in the near-desert, the waning moon would shine on yucca and sandstone. It was a night for sharp teeth and quick death. The air itself was knotted tight with expectation.

We canvassed the easier places on Avery’s list first: the missions, Prosper Alley, the shooting gallery on Trask Street, the fountain in Plaskény Square. Nada. Not a whisper of our target.

Plenty of the people we saw that night had no idea we were there. I stayed close to Saul, and Were camouflage took care of hiding us both. Weres are traditionally hunters’ allies, and plenty of times a hunter has been grateful for the furkind’s ability to conceal. I was odd among hunters in that I actually slept with my backup, but by no means unique. Most Weres don’t like bedplay with humans; we’re too fragile.

But with the scar on my wrist, I was no longer so fragile. It made things interesting.

Just the way Saul’s initial distrust and distaste for me and my helltainted self had made things interesting. Sometimes I wondered why he had come back.

You can find bums in any city. Looking for a particular homeless man in Santa Luz is needle-in-a-haystack frustrating. You just roll around a lot and hope to get stuck in the right place.

We were casing the second large mecca of the dispossessed in Santa Luz, Broadway. I walked beside Saul carefully, occasionally glancing down at the cracked sidewalk, threading between groups of street kids gathering in doorways and sharing cigarettes of both legal and nonlegal origin. Quite a few had bottles in brown paper bags, and a good number of them were younger than Baby Jewel. Dreadlocks, dyed hair, piercings, layers of clothing as they struggled to stay warm in the desert night, gangs and streetfamilies drawing together for comfort and protection—it was enough, really, to make a cynic out of anyone.

I caught sight of a thin, nervous-looking man with a scruff of brown hair, sharing hits off a bottle with a taller scarecrow of a black man in army fatigues. The brown-haired scruff wore a dun coat and a red backpack, black boots, and a shocking-blue T-shirt.

Saul marked him a full fifteen seconds after I did. “That him?”

“Coat, backpack, boots, and a serious case of nerves. Looks like it.” I started forward, but Saul’s hand closed around my arm. “What?”

He tilted his head. “Someone else is looking.”

I looked. There, tucked into a slice of shadow like a professional, a skinny man in a long dirty duster finished un-smoking a cigarette. The red eye glowed as he dropped it, and he was too clean-shaven to be a homeless man. And it’s not just strange to see a homeless man drop a smoke halfway to the filter, especially when he doesn’t take a drag before he does it.

It rings every wrong bell in a hunter’s head to see something like that.

“Got enough metal on him for me to smell, and he’s hunting,” Saul murmured in my ear. I barely nodded, letting him know I’d heard him.

Mercenary? Or something else?

I thought this over, examining our new player. Was he looking for Robbie or just for trouble? He didn’t seem to have the nervous witness in his sights, but he was certainly up to no good. And if Saul could smell gunplay and violence on him, he was probably someone I should have a nice little chat with.

You can call me paranoid, but I rarely believe in pure coincidence. Usually coincidence gets a little help in a situation like this.

“Get our witness. Question him if you feel like it.” I slid a slim, black-finished blade out of its sheath and reversed it along my arm. “I’ll see what’s up with our little friend over there.”

“You got it. Where should I take the jitterboy?”

I did a rapid mental calculation of location and distance. “Take him to Woo Song’s and buy him dinner, but don’t let him drink any more. I’ll meet you as soon as I can. Get every scrap of information you can from him. And play nice.”

“I will.” He looked, again, like he wanted to say be careful. But he didn’t. He merely bent down, kissed my temple, and slid away, leaving me without a Were’s camouflage.

I set off across the street at an angle calculated to bring me into our mysterious visitor’s blind spot.

Unfortunately, I realized as I was halfway across Broadway, our friend wasn’t alone. His backup was on the roof, and as bullets chewed into the pavement behind me and the screaming started, I realized that this wasn’t normal at all. Nothing about this was usual. And that usually added up to one very fucked Jill Kismet.

I rolled, taking cover behind a parked car. Glass shattered; whoever it was had a fucking assault rifle and was spraying the car. The knife vanished, and I spared a brief prayer for the civilians on the street. Let’s have no casualties, Jill.

That is, except for the ones you want to inflict.