Hunter's Prayer

Chapter Seventeen

I didn’t call Galina; I had already dumped one witness on her. Instead, I called Avery and wished Saul had a cell phone. Then again, if he was down in the barrio, he didn’t need any distraction. He’d catch up with me soon enough.

Ave promised to drop by and pick up the girl as soon as he could, which meant three hours since he was on his Sunday overnight shift. One of those hours I spent questioning her. She was bright and relatively observant, and living on the street had fine-tuned her instinct for what was bullshit and what was truth left unsaid.

What Cecilia could tell me was almost as interesting as what she couldn’t. The doctor on Quincoa—Kricekwesz—had been taking care of street girls as a profitable side gig for a long time now. Recently, though, whispers had started. The flesh gallery was alive with rumors, because girls that told their running mates or coworkers (if such a word could be used for girls that worked for the same pimp or walked the same bit of street) that they had a little “trouble” started disappearing. And the girls that visited the doctor came back with appointments to see him again—but never got there.

“It’s not just girls,” Cecilia told me. “Some of the street kids, the young ones, get taken too. And some of the older rummies on the street have started to talk about weird things. Seeing weird things.” When pressed, she shook her head. “I dunno. I’ve heard everything from UFOs to Sasquatch. Real crazy shit.”

If other people had seen what Robbie the Juicer had seen, no wonder the street scene was boiling with rumor.

The most interesting piece of news was the pimps all getting together after I’d put the squeeze on Ricky. A meet was something that only happened in dire circumstances, thanks to the egos of the petty thugs involved. There was always fresh meat, but one or two of the flash boys had been grumbling about something cutting into their profit by picking off the girls. Ricky had thrown a fit, but he was small fry even though his girls had some prime real estate.

Another pimp, a heavyset black man with gold-capped front teeth who went by the name of Jonte, had told everyone to shut up, because they would be getting paid plenty. He’d told Ricky in no uncertain terms that the little shit hadn’t been let in on the action because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, Ricky had gotten fresh and got bitch-smacked for his pains. Which explained why the smacking had devolved onto Cecilia, incidentally.

And then there was the bombshell. The meeting had also been attended by a representative from the local Mob, Jimmy Rocadero, with two bodyguards. Beyond supporting Jonte’s claim that the pimps would be paid plenty for going along with the program, Rocadero hadn’t said much, but his mere presence had scared some of the smaller fish in the pond. Every pimp in Santa Luz paid a percentage to the Mob. It was just how business is done.

“Do you know if the strip clubs are having similar turnover?” I asked.

Cecilia, the worst of her scrapes Bactined and a few Band-Aids applied, as well as arnica to take down some of the worst swelling, no longer even looked eighteen. Instead, she looked twelve. A very frightened twelve. She curled up on my couch with a battered teddy bear she’d fished out of her backpack and jumped at the slightest noise. I hoped her ribs weren’t busted up; she sounded horrible when she breathed. She had nothing but short skirts and hot pants in her backpack, so I’d rustled up a pair of paint-splattered sweats for her. She shook her head. “I dunno. I never did the strips. By the time I was old enough I was already turned out for Ricky.”

I sat on the floor, cross-legged in leather pants and a Prospero’s Housewives T-shirt, thinking about this. The need for action boiled away under my breastbone, but there was nothing I could do right at the moment except get every scrap of information I could from this girl.

I had brought out a package of Oreos, and she was putting them away at a steady rate. I hope she doesn’t make herself sick. I had a sudden vision of holding her long brown hair back while she retched.

It wasn’t pleasant.

I took a closer look at her. She’d been pretty, and bright enough to escape getting hooked on something deadly. I pegged her as smart but terribly needy, probably a cheerleader in high school with a bad home life that she thought running away would save her from.

Like looking into a fucking mirror, eh, Jill?

I pushed that voice away. It was time for the most inconsequential but revealing question.

“So why did you bail out on Ricky?” I tented my fingers and leaned forward, bracing my elbows on the coffee table. Saul’s slippers lay neatly underneath, and my knee touched one of them. I found it absurdly comforting.

She actually blushed. Her cheeks turned red, and she looked down at the package of Oreos.

I caught the message. I should have smelled it on her, but under the fume of hellbreed and fury from my own skin and yeast-alcohol beer from hers, it would have been a miracle to catch it.

Christ. “Okay. Please tell me you haven’t been out to Quincoa.”

“I haven’t,” she whispered. “But Ricky called the doctor to make the appointment for me. I said I wouldn’t go. He…”

“That’s when he got all nasty on you.” I nodded. Great. It must have been the last straw.

“I told him I’d go after he hit me. But I… there are people who know stuff. I went to this head shop on Salvador Avenue, I told them I was looking for you. That I needed help. The woman there said to come here. I walked the whole way.”

And if I’d checked my messages, I’d probably have heard one from Jordan letting me know someone in need was heading my way. Dammit. “All right.” I stared at the tabletop, my finger tracing an invisible sign on the wood. “The best thing to do—”

I stopped. Tilted my head a little. What was that?

The sound came again. A scrambling, and a stroking of claws on cold concrete. Far away, but growing closer, coming from the east.

Oh shit. The sensation of danger was immediate, palpable, and hair-raising. My head snapped up, my right hand automatically blurred for a gun, and Cecilia gasped.

“Get up,” I snapped, leaping to my feet, barking my knee a good one on the coffee table. Wood cracked, but I hardly noticed the brief burst of pain. “Get the fuck up. Come on.”

“What’s happened? What’s going on?” She flinched, her eyes getting even rounder as she saw the gun. I stalked for the recliner by the small table where I did tarot card readings, scooped up my battered leather coat, and shrugged into it, passing the gun from hand to hand.

“Something’s coming. I just heard it. It’ll trip the first line of defenses and alarms around my house in, oh, ninety seconds.” I couldn’t restrain a hard, delighted grin. “You don’t think I’d sit in here helpless, do you? Move, girl. You’re going to play mousie and hide in the hole.”

It was probably a good thing she was trained to immediate obedience, even if I could have cheerfully ripped Diamond Ricky’s nuts off for the beating he’d given an underweight girl. She scrambled up the rickety wooden ladder, her breathing coming short and hard. Her bruised ankles were terribly thin. When she reached the top, her battered face peered down at me.

“Pull this up.” I helped her get the ladder up. “Now close that fucking trapdoor and lock it. Stay up there until I come get you, or until dawn. If it takes me out, go to the precinct house on Alameda and ask for Montaigne. He’ll take care of you. I know you don’t like cops, but he’s all right.”

She nodded, biting her lip. Tears rolled down her pale, bruise-mottled cheeks. “Why are you doing this?”

What the fuck do you mean, why am I doing this? I’m a hunter. I protect the innocent. “This is what I do. Now close that door and lock it, bitch!”

She scrambled to obey. The heavy lead-sheeted trapdoor closed; the little hidey-hole was in the bedroom, where the mixed scent of Were and hellbreed hunter would help mask her fear and human smell.

I’d also wanted the bedroom for the extra ammo stash, and it took a few seconds I didn’t have to load up on silverjacketed lead, each full magazine slid into the loops sewn in my coat. Better to have the ammo and not need it, especially if what I had in mind didn’t work. I wished I could use the bullwhip, but that was for Traders. The little distance a thin bit of leather would give me, critical for facing down a full hellbreed, wasn’t going to be any frocking help against something this fast.

So I ran for the practice room, my breath coming hard and harsh in my chest. Skidded against the hardwood and reached it just as the front door shuddered under a massive impact. It had taken the thing two and a half minutes to reach my home; maybe they’d let it out in Percoa Park or down on Lucado somewhere?

I shelved the question as the door shuddered again. Wonderful. Didn’t your mother ever teach you to knock? I ran along the side of the room, each step seeming to take forever, toward the long shape lying under its fall of amber silk on the far back wall, its shape reflecting in the eight-foot mirrored panels.

The silk slipped in my fingers as it crashed onto the front door for the third time. I hear you knockin’, a lunatic Little Richard screamed inside my head, but you cain’t come in!

“Shut up,” I gasped to myself, and tore the silk free.

There, humming with malignant force, was the long, fluidly carved iron staff. A slim dragon head snarled at either end. The leather cuff I tore from my right wrist, gasping as air hit suddenly sensitive skin. I felt the humming of etheric force begin to cascade around me as my right hand closed around the staff’s slim length.

The iron burned, pain jolting up my arm. “Thou shalt serve me,” I whispered. “By the grace of the Destroyer, thou shalt serve me!”

The staff subsided as I lifted it down, my knuckles white against its oiled metal gleam. It had tested my will only once, in a massive struggle inside a consecrated circle, the final test before my Hell-descent, before I was a full-fledged hunter in my own right. It rumbled in my hands, restive—too much blood and violence swirling in my aura and way too long since the last time I’d used it, even to drain off its excess charge. I would have to drain it to about half-strength soon, and deal with a couple of days of nosebleeds.

That is, if what I was about to do now didn’t drain it, and if I survived.

I really wish I could use the whip. My hands tightened. I whirled, testing the heft, the dragon heads clove the air with a sweet low whistling sound. Then I gathered myself and ran for the front door.

The etheric protections in the walls screamed and tore as the physical structure gave way too. I dug my bootheels in, skidding to a stop in the living room, the staff held slightly tilted in front of me, both hands aching where they gripped its coldness. Then it began to warm, vibrating with eagerness, and the scar on my wrist turned hot and hard again.

“Come to Mama, you hunk of shit,” I whispered, and the creature slammed through the crumbling wall. Rebar snapped, chunks of concrete and wooden paneling flying, and the staff jerked up in my hands, coming alive. There was a soft snick, deadly curved blades springing from the dragons’ mouths. Warm electric light drifted down as the thing came for me, a faint silver glimmer showing at its low unhealthy neck.

As usual when I was holding the staff, things seemed oddly slow. Shift the weight, throwing the hip forward—in both whip and staff work, the hip leads. A sweet low sound as the blades cut the air, the complicated double-eight pattern becoming a blur of motion.

Then, impact.

It smashed into me again, the low, fluid somehow-wrong shape that my eyes hurt straining to see. The staff jerked in my hands, supple and alive, singing its low tone of bloodlust as it clove both air and preternatural skin. Fur flew, and the gagging stench of it enveloped me, can’t breathe can’t fight but I was going to give it an old college try, something black and foul exploded and the cold smacked through me, a cold like a razor burn with the bile in my throat, good thing I hadn’t eaten anything because the Scotch boiled in my stomach looking to escape the hard way.

And as always, when the staff was in my hands and time blurred around me, the dragons beginning their long bloodthirsty moaning and the blades slicing the air as I retreated, shuffling, I felt it. The cold clear chill of the world falling into place, everything stark and simple.

Kill or be killed.

Another gagging, retching breath, pluming in the frozen air as the staff executed a complex maneuver, going so fast it almost seemed to turn on itself, Mikhail’s voice screaming in my head and the entire world narrowing to don’t get dead move move move, no time for thinking, only time for pure trained reflex that is nonetheless informed with a great deal of thought. The fastest fucker in the world can still do something thoughtless and end up dead. Moving is not enough; one must move correctly.

The creature howled and came at me again. It was vaguely humanoid despite the claws. Which clanged off one blade—but the staff was working hard, humming to itself contentedly as if it had finally found something to wake it up and exercise it a little. My arms ached, especially the scar that was a knot of fire against my wrist, etheric energy humming through it; but the fierce high excitement beating behind my breastbone didn’t let up, and I knew who was making that terrible sound under the snarling and foul nails-on-chalkboard howling of the creature.

It was a high chilling giggle, clear as crystal and cold as midnight in a moon-drenched room. It was my own voice, laughing, crazed with bloodlust. The scar turned blood-warm, strength like wine flooding my limbs, and the charms in my hair rattled and struck together with cracks like lightning.

The creature backed up and snarled. I snarled back, almost twitching in my eagerness to kill, ice painting the air as my breath froze. It was human-shaped, and I was so far gone by then that I peered underneath its scrim of hair and blinding blur. Only for a moment, trying to decipher the silver glimmer at its throat—a chain? A leash? Who knew?

Then it backed up, holding its front left limb up as if I’d wounded it. Black sludge dripped on the floor, smoking in the cold.

I laughed again, that chilling tinkling sound that broke glass and shivered the wooden flooring into splinters. Kill it. Kill. Kill.

A crackling bolt of blue hellfire lanced through the shattered air, splashing against the thing’s side. It howled again and streaked away, its footfalls heavy and off-kilter now. I heard it drumming the surface of the earth as I whirled on the balls of my feet to meet this new threat.

The scar turned hot and hard. I felt Perry like a storm front moving through, a change of pressure that meant lightning. But that wasn’t what made me freeze. Standing amid the shattered wreckage, his eyes dark and infinite, Saul shoved his hands deep in his coat pockets and regarded me. Steam drifted up from his skin. The couch was a shambled mess, the kitchen was torn all to hell, every mirror and window in the place was shattered and crusted with ice.

And still, my hands tightened on the staff. The blades hummed, alert, vibrating with bloodlust. Kill? the slim length of iron, old when Atlantis was young, hummed in its subsonic language. Kill? Kill? Destroy?

What civilization the staff was an artifact of, I didn’t know. Mikhail hadn’t known either. But ever since that highly advanced people had shaped this length of steel into a long wand with stylized dragon heads at either end—and don’t ask me how we know they’re dragon heads, we just do—it has been used for one thing.

Bloodshed. Destruction. The secret to handling it has been passed down from hunter to hunter in an unbroken line since its creation—or so Mikhail told me.

I had no reason to disbelieve him. Once, and only once, I think I saw what the world had looked like when the staff was created. The fact that I wasn’t howlingly insane meant I had passed the test and was ready to descend into Hell—and come back, a full hunter.

My muscles spasmed. The terrible battle began, me trying to wrench my fingers free of the iron, the staff screaming to be set free, to whistle through the air again, to cleave flesh and anything harder, anything at all, to maim and rip and tear. Blood trickled hot down my side, down my leg, down my arm from my left shoulder, turned into hamburger by the thing’s claws.

But Saul’s eyes were dark, and he didn’t look away. He didn’t move. The electric current between us—the thing in him that saw past every wall I’ve ever built to defend myself, the thing in me that recognized him—went deeper than all the bloody raw places in my head, deeper than my breath and bones and blood, and deeper still.

He knew me, even now.

It seemed to take forever but was in reality only a few seconds before I could make my fingers unloose. The staff slid toward the floor, I spun it, turning with a scream of agonized muscles and a cry that shattered each iota of broken glass into smaller shards and tore the scrim of ice into steaming fragments. The staff tore free, taking the skin on my palms with it, and smashed into the wall. Stuck there, sunk six inches into the concrete, quivering.

I let out a low harsh sound. Swayed, the small spattering sound of blood hitting the floor very loud in the stillness. I suddenly became aware that I had been moving in ways a human body hadn’t been designed to move, even one with the help of a chunk of meteoric, pre-Atlantean steel and a hellbreed scar on one wrist. Everything hurt, a scalding fiery pain.

But my heart still beat, so fast the pounding in my wrists and throat was a hummingbird’s wings. I was still taking in great ragged breaths, panting, my ribs flickering as they heaved, fiery oil spreading up my left side. My shoulders felt dipped in molten lead and my legs felt like wet noodles and my head, my God, my head felt like it was going to crack down the middle, like some demented dwarf was driving glass pins through my brain.

I swayed again, sour taste of adrenaline in my mouth. Heard someone else moving and knew it wasn’t Saul approaching me, knew it wasn’t him, and moved without thought.

My fingers had turned into claws, and I screamed as my nails tore through Perry’s face, the scar on my wrist giving an agonized flare of pleasure. Then Saul had me in his arms, was talking to me as I struggled, he had me caught in a bear hug and took my legs out from under me, we hit the ground among debris and melting ice and I struggled, getting wood dust, glass, plaster, water, all sorts of crap in my hair before Saul snarled at me, burying his face in my throat, and I went utterly still. The sharp edges of his teeth could open my carotid in a moment.

I made a low sobbing noise, gongs clanging inside my head. “Si-si-si-si—”

I was trying to tell him there was a civilian in the house, someone I had been protecting, when I passed out.