Hunter's Prayer

Chapter Fourteen

Sisters of Mercy rose above downtown like a giant brooding concrete bird. The old hospital was lost in a welter of pavement, but the great granite Jesus tacked on the roof still glowered in the direction of the financial district. We went in through the side entrance and suffered the immediate attack of linoleum, disinfectant, floor wax, and the smell of suffering.

Saul reached down and took my hand as soon as we walked in. I’ve grown to hate hospitals. Don’t get me wrong—they’re mostly wonderful places, staffed by some of the best and most dedicated around. But like schools, they just raise my hackles. So much suffering and free energy floating around, whether from illness and dying or from kids squeezed into little boxes and told to behave; so much pain. It’s a charged atmosphere, which is good for a hunter—we kind of amp up to meet that charge—and bad for a hunter as well. There’s only so long you can stay with your hackles up before going a little wack.

Of course, the case could be made that we’re all permanently wack anyway.

We took the stairs up to the fifth floor, post-cardiac. My footsteps echoed in the hall, and I began to feel a little uneasy. My fingers tightened, and Saul gave me a single inquiring look.

I spotted Father Guillermo down the hall, and felt my face harden. It still rankled. The Church funded training for quite a few hunters, but it was an article of faith and doctrine that we were going to Hell for our traffic with and contamination by the nightside. Still, I’d thought I could trust Gui, that he wouldn’t… well, hold out on me.

Treat me like just another layman.

God knew I’d handled enough exorcisms for him. I deserved a little bit of warning if his seminary was holding a relic or artifact—even if it was very likely that the Sorrows had no interest in the fucking thing.

Why were they there, then? What the hell’s going on with that?

The scar tightened, sending a flush of heat up my arm. I stopped dead. My nostrils flared. Saul went still and dangerous beside me.

“You smell that?” I asked, as he let go of my hand and reached for the hilt of his Bowie.

“Incense,” he replied. “And blood. A blue smell.”

Not just a blue smell, but a smell I remembered. A smell that made my hackles not just rise, but stiffen into steel spikes and pulse with bloodlust.

God, how I hate them. Hate them.

“A Sorrows adept.” I shook my hair back. The hallway was cluttered along the sides with little stations for doing paperwork, bits of medical paraphernalia, doctors in doors talking quietly or striding away purposefully—and Father Gui, his stare blank as he leaned against the wall three feet away from a door that was slightly ajar.

Probably Father Rosas’s room.

I went for my guns, they cleared leather in a heartbeat. Kept them low, glanced up at Saul. His cheeks were pale under his darker coloring.

“Keep track of Gui,” I whispered. “If he starts to act possessed, just back off and keep him in sight. Okay?”

“’Kay.” He knew the drill. “Gonna kill a Sorrow, baby?”

As many of them as I can in this lifetime. “You better believe it.” I started down the hall.

They don’t tell you in training how the world slows down with each footstep as you approach a fight. Each breath takes forever. The palms get sweaty, the heart beats thick and fast, the hair on the back of the neck tries to stand straight up.

All in all, great fun.

Father Gui stared straight ahead. He made no move, and I didn’t sense anything demonic in him. His tumbled black curls rested sleekly against his head, and his eyes were glazed, half-closed. The smoky oddness of a hypno-spell wove in the air around him, and I cursed inwardly. Finding out if the Sorrow had planted any triggers in him would be uncomfortable at best.

I pushed the hospital door in with my foot, every nerve aware of Gui leaning against the wall. If he moved with the eerie speed of the possessed, this could get really ugly really quick.

I saw a slice of the hospital room, a pale blue curtain drawn around the bed, the door to a small bathroom standing ajar. Christ. Take your pick. Do you think a Sorrow’s going to be hiding in the can, or behind the curtain? Standing next to Father Rosas with a knife to his carotid, maybe? It’d be just like a Sorrow to take a hostage and kill ’em anyway.

I paused. The beeps of a heart monitor sounded, brightly ticking off cardiac squeezes. The sound came from behind the blue curtain, and the room was full of the blue, incense-laden smell of a Chaldean whore.

“You can come in,” a familiar voice said. “I’m at the window. And I’m alone.”

A woman’s voice. My entire body went cold, then flushed with the heat of rage. I knew that voice. Of all the adepts of any Sorrows House, it was the last one I would think stupid enough to put herself in a room with me.

It was the bitch herself, Melisande Belisa.

The woman who had killed my teacher.

She was in the window, but I checked the bathroom and ripped aside the curtain. Jolly fat Father Rosas, his cheeks ashen, slumbered the sleep of a tranquilized and tired old man. The red blossoms on his nose and upper cheeks were testament to his love for the bottle, and his graying black hair was lank and greasy, beginning to go bald on top. But he was whole, and still alive—and he had a visitor.

She had long black hair, blue-black, and a hint of tilted-catlike to her eyes. Her skin was a little darker than the Sorrows usually preferred, but well within canons, and her eyes were the limitless black of the adept who has practiced for more than four cycles of their calendar; black from lid to lid, no iris or white to break the sheer gelid orbs. She wore delicate golden eardrops, and the bruising of Chaldean my blue eye could see in her aura was disciplined, a parasitical symbiote. A sickness that helped, like an arkeus helped a Trader.

The Elder Gods give to those who serve them well, almost as often as they consume them.

She wore blue silk, in utter defiance of passing for normal. A Chinese-collared shirt, loose pants, slipperlike shoes. As if she was still in a House’s quiet, incense-laden darkness, shafts of sunlight piercing the dim smoke.

If it was the end of a cycle by their calendar, the air would be full of crackling expectation; and as night fell there would be a black flashing knife and the gurgle as a drugged prisoner—or more likely, one of their own, a male raised in the House’s gloom for just this purpose—would wind up throat-slit, sacrificial death fueling ceremonies from a time when the Elder Gods walked the earth.

The Elder Gods were gone now, locked behind a wall so old even hunter legends only whisper of its making. But sometimes the smaller Chaldean demons come through and wreak havoc. The Sorrows accumulate what they can and spread their Houses like a sickness, praying for the return of their hungry masters.

I lifted both guns. My fingers tightened. Sunlight fell over her, bringing out the highlights in her hair, the mellow burnish of her skin.

“I need your help,” she said.

Oh, for Christ’s sake. I’ve had all I can stand of people saying utterly incomprehensible things. “For Mikhail,” I whispered. Father Rosas’s heart monitor beeped, incongruous in the charged, suddenly buzzing quiet.

She lifted both hands, palm-out but loose, with no tingle of sorcery surrounding them. “I loved him too. I just had to kill him.”

I felt it again, Mikhail’s body in my arms as he choked on blood and her mocking freezing laughter as she disappeared. As I screamed Mikhail’s name until the Weres—small consolation that they were watching him just as I was—came to bear him away from the shitty little hotel room where he’d breathed his last and give him a clean-burning pyre.

And not so incidentally, to restrain me as I tried to throw myself after the Sorrows adept. She would have killed me then.

I was stronger now.

Shoot her now, goddammit! Shoot her! “I told you. No Sorrows in my city.” My voice cracked, I could barely force out a whisper through my rage-tightened throat.

“You killed my brother.” A swift grimace pulled down the corners of her pretty mouth. “We thought he could stay here unnoticed. In a seminary.”

“Was an utt’huruk in one of his classmates part of the plan?” My voice was ragged. Kill her. Kill her now.

But she had used that word. Brother. It wasn’t like a Sorrow. And he’d said, sister.

They lied, though. It was SOP when dealing with Sorrows: don’t believe a fucking word. Masters of the mindfuck, sometimes they even make Perry look simple.

And this one had taken in my teacher, probably the smartest fucking hunter on the face of the earth. She had done it so easily.

“The Chaser was sent to bring him back. It took you to kill him, hunter.”

Like hell. How did it get in Oscar? By mistake? “He bit his poison tooth.” The words tasted like ash in my mouth. The situation began to resolve behind my eyes—maybe the Sorrows boy had been hiding out in the seminary. It was almost likely, and almost logical.

“I don’t blame him. We know how… unkindly you view us.” The sunlight faded, a cloud drifting across the sky. She looked out the window, presenting me with a profile I had only seen before in shadows, through a haze of bloodlust, rage, fear, grief. And a slice of her throat, visible above the Chinese collar. “I am in violation, hunter, and I’ve come here for your help. One of our adepts has escaped us, and is engaging in forbidden acts.”

I felt one eyebrow raise. “I didn’t think there were any acts forbidden to a Sorrows House adept. Except, of course, being a decent fucking human being.” I eased back on the triggers a little, kept the guns pointed at her. Saw Mikhail’s face again, the light dimming in his eyes, the last gurgle as blood pumped free of the gaping razor-made wound in his throat.

And oh, how he had loved her, meeting her in furtive alleys and motels, keeping his relationship with her a secret even from me. Even though I’d been his apprentice, closer to him than anyone else, Mikhail had kept his secrets. A hunter, snared in a Sorrow’s net, Belisa’s plaything in a game still murky to me. After his death the Weres and I had cleared the Sorrows House on Damietta Street.

I had not left a single one of them alive. But Belisa had already stolen Mikhail’s amulet, the Eye of Sekhmet. It was probably in a Sorrows treasure-room right now, a pretty prize that had probably bought her the right to move up a few more ranks in the stifling cloister of priestesses.

True to form, she didn’t even offer an apology. “Both New Blasphemy priests are alive.” She kept looking out the window. “And so is your pet cat. Be grateful.”

Let me take off my cuff and thank you, bitch. “You have twenty seconds before I blast you out that window and into Hell,” I informed her. Calm and steady, Jill. See what she knows, if anything. “You might want to start talking.”

“Her name is Inez Germaine.” She smiled as she dropped this piece of news. “Blood-colored hair, very sleek. From the North House in Alsace-Lorraine.”

I stared at her. Could Robbie have mistaken Chaldean for French?

No way. They don’t even sound similar. “I’m still not convinced.” I thumbed the hammers back slowly, hearing two small clicks. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six.

“She is attempting an evocation, hunter. She is fueling it with death and acquiring funding from the sale of bodily—”

Four. Three. I’ll admit it. I lost my temper and fired early.

I pulled both triggers at the same time, the sound was deafening. I kept firing, glass shattering, she was gone in a flurry of blue silk. I leapt to the window ledge, clearing the bed in one swift movement, and almost plunged out, just in time to see her land on the pavement below, roll gracefully, and bolt down Sarcado Avenue. Glass ground under my feet as I crouched on the windowsill, both guns leveled.

Five stories is nothing to a Sorrow, going after her now will just make everything messy. She had an escape route planned. This was the first step in the game. Just like she played with Mikhail.

No getting away this time, bitch. Not on my watch.

I took careful aim with my right-hand gun, closing out everything around me, including Saul bursting through the door and the sudden scramble of sound from the hall. Sighted at her fleeing back, inhaling smoothly; squeezed the trigger.

Roaring sound, smell of cordite. I swear I could almost see the bullet as it leapt from the gun’s barrel, a brief burst of muzzle flash lost in the weak cloudy winter light.

She stumbled, red blossoming as her right shoulderblade shattered. That’s going to hurt as it heals, isn’t it. No matter. I’ll hunt you slowly. And before I’m done, bitch, you’re going to beg. Just like Mikhail did.

Six months I’d spent eating myself alive, wondering if I’d been too late to save my teacher because of jealousy, like any jilted lover. Until Saul and a hunt for a rogue Were had crossed into my city, and Perry’s game to eat up whatever was left of my soul had shown me with stark clarity that I had not been to blame.

I had not killed my teacher. She had.

“Jill? Jill?” Saul. He grabbed my shoulders, dragged me back from the window. “What the fuck?”

“It’s her,” I was saying, in a monotone. “It’s her. The bitch. It’s her.” The beeps of the heart monitor were steady in the background; Father Rosas hadn’t even twitched. He must have been tranked out of his mind.

“Christ, was that really a Sorrow?” He shook me as I heard yells out in the corridor, running feet. “Jill? It reeks in here. Jillian!”

“It’s okay.” I shook my head. I was shaking, and my voice hit the level just a hair under “blood-chilling”: soft, chanting in a singsong, tasting each word. “I’m okay. It’s her. The bitch herself. I’m going to take her apart joint by fucking joint—”

“Come on.” He pulled me under his arm and dragged me toward the door, the peculiar blurring of his Were camouflage beginning just at the corner of my vision. “Jesus Christ, you were only in here for a minute. Can’t I leave you alone for ten seconds without gunfire? This is a hospital.”

Do you really want me to answer that, Saul? I let him pull me along, numbly. It’s her. The bitch. It’s her.

“To hell with dead whores,” I heard myself say. “I’m going to hunt myself a Sorrow.”

Then my left hand came up, I would have clapped it over my mouth if it hadn’t still been full of heavy metal gun. “Christ,” I choked. “I think I’m going to be fucking sick.”

“Hold it for a few seconds,” he replied, practically, palming the door open and dragging me out into the hall. He got me down the hall, neatly avoiding the chaos of security guards and running nurses, and out through a fire door, adding to the general fun. I felt sorry for the poor cardiac patients, fleetingly. And sorry for Father Rosas, though he probably hadn’t heard a damn thing. She’d probably drugged him; poison and chemicals are a Sorrow’s stock-in-trade. And Guillermo would mean less than nothing to her. Belisa’s game right now was with me.

In an alley below I lost breakfast and everything I’d ever thought of eating for lunch. Saul held my hair back as I retched and swore, alternately, hearing the little gurgle of Mikhail’s life bubbling out through his throat and her laughter like tinkling glass.

All in all, for facing down Belisa again, I handled it pretty well.