Redemption Alley

Chapter Seventeen

I hate having guests. Especially uninvited guests.

And most definitely, especially, uninvited guests who barely wait until I’m through the door before they try to kill me.

Word of advice: If you are looking to catch a hunter by surprise, don’t do it in her house, for Chrissake. Any place a hunter sleeps is likely to be well-defended, and if it’s easy to break in you should be wondering how hard it’s going to be to escape. A hunter does not sleep somewhere without knowing every crack and creak in the walls—which includes knowing when some sloppy-ass hellbreed has slithered through a window and is breathing heavily behind your door.

So I was ready when I stepped through and dropped down into a crouch. The dirty-blond ’breed hesitated, flew over my head and smacked himself a good one on the jamb. Wood splintered and I drove upward with the knife, the silver laid along the blade hissing with bluespark flame as it met Hell-tainted flesh.

The ’breed twisted on himself in midair with that gut-loosening spooky agility they all have. The hardest thing to get used to is how they move, in ways human joints can’t and human muscles never would. I spun a full one-eighty, bootsole scraping the linoleum just inside the door, and went down flat on my back in the entry hall.

Come to Mama, you stupid fuck. The bleeding ’breed didn’t disappoint, dropping down with claws outstretched, face twisted into a grinning mask of hate. Maybe he thought I was vulnerable, since I was on the floor.

I spend half my fighting life on the floor. Judo’s not just fun, it’s a lifesaver. Once you ground a ’breed or, say, a Possessor, their advantage in speed is gone and their edge in strength is halved if you know anything about leverage. But I had no intention of wriggling around with this jerkwad.

No, I shot him four times, punching through the shell of hellbreed skin, and flicked a boot up to catch his wounded belly, deflecting his leap by a few critical degrees so he sailed over me and splatted, screaming like a banshee, onto the hardwood floor.

I was on my feet again in a trice, knife dropped chiming to the floor, kicked away so the ’breed couldn’t reach it, and my fingers closing around the bullwhip’s handle. A quick jerk, a flick of my wrist, and braided leather snapped through the air, the tiny sharp bits of silvery metal tied on the end of the whip breaking the sound barrier and scoring hellbreed flesh.

This is why hunters use whips. It gives us reach we otherwise wouldn’t have. I was already pulling the trigger, firing twice more, the reports booming and echoing through my silent house. I was only a half-inch off on the right shoulder, but my first shot took him right through the ball-joint of the left. That took some of the pep out of my unwanted visitor—but not all of it.

The whip flickered again, like a snake’s tongue weighted with razorblades. It tore across the ’breed’s face, and by now I’m sure both of us had figured out I wanted him taken alive.

I wanted answers.

He still put up a fight, but when I broke his left arm in three places and got him down on the floor, the silver-loaded blade of another knife to his throat, the squealing from him took on an animal sound I was more than familiar with.

I didn’t recognize this chalk-skinned scarecrow of a ’breed. He was definitely male, catslit blue eyes glowing even in the wash of electric light. Fucker left my lights on. How stupid can you be? “Do I have to cut your throat?” I whispered in his ear, knowing he would feel the brush of my breath through the matted fringe of blond hair. He was bleeding thin black ichor, a wash of the stinking stuff all over my dusty wooden floor.

Once the hard shell is broken, the bad in a hellbreed leaks out. Once that shell is breached with silver, an allergic reaction sets in too. The blade ran with blue sparks, reacting to the brackish foulness of Hell the scarecrow exhaled. He wore a black silk button-down and designer jeans, but his battered, horn-callused feet were bare, the toes too flexible to be human and graced with curling yellow nails.

He went still. I bore down with all my hellbreed-given strength. The scar pulsed, sensing something akin to its corruption. He whined, right at the back of the throat, and went limp, the subvocal groaning of Helletöng rattling in my ears.

“I don’t speak anything but human, asshole.” I kept the whisper down, my breath heaving. My head hurt, a pounding stuffed between my temples. Hell of a day. Stay focused, Jill. “You going to settle down?”

He writhed a little, testing, but subsided. I was braced and exerting leverage on the broken arm, grinding both shattered shoulders into the floor. He was losing a lot of ichor. Don’t you dare fucking die before I find out who sent you.

A long string of obscenities, made all the more ugly by the tenor sweetness of his voice. The damned are always beautiful, or the seeming they wear to fool the world is. I’ve never seen an ugly ’breed—except for Perry, and he wasn’t truly ugly.

Did Perry send you? “Who sent you?” I ground down again, was rewarded by a hiss of pain. My arm tightened, and the silver-loaded knife pressed lacerated skin.

The hissing yowl of his pain was matched only by the sound of sizzling. It ended on a high almost-canine yip when I let up a bit.

“I’ve got all night to make you talk.” My throat was full of something too hot and acid to be anger or hatred. The smell was eyewatering, terrific, colossal, burning into my brain. I ignored it, braced my knee, and tensed. “And I enjoy my work, hellspawn.”

“Shen,” he whispered. “Shenan—”

Oh holy shit. But there was no time, he heaved up and my grasp slipped in a scrim of foul oil. I set my teeth and my knees and yanked, twisting; an easy, fluid motion and a jet of sour black arterial spray. His cry ended on a gurgle, and his rebellion died almost before it had begun.

Cold night air poured through the open door, cleaner than anything inside. I coughed, rackingly, my eyes burning as I struggled free of the rapidly rotting thing on the floor. A young, hungry blond ’breed, maybe thinking to prove something.

But. Shen. Shenan.

There was only one thing that could mean.

Shenandoah. Or, if you had your accent on right, Shen An Dua.

In other words, seriously fucking bad news. If Perry was the unquestioned leader of the hellbreed in Santa Luz, keeping that position through murder and subterfuge, Shen was the queen, or an éminence grise. She was the biggest contender for replacing Perry if he ever got unlucky or soft—and that thought, friends and neighbors, was enough to break out any hunter in a cold sweat.

Gender means less than nothing when it comes to ’breed, but all in all I’d rather deal with a male. Female hellbreed just seem deadlier.

I coughed so hard I retched. The stink was amazing. It had been a day of varied and wonderful stenches, that was for goddamn sure. Theron was due to come back and find this mess lying around. If there’s anything I hate more than cooking, it’s cleaning up hellbreed mess from my own goddamn floor.

I toed the door closed, wishing I wasn’t silhouetted in the rectangle of golden electric light. Locked it, and stood for a moment. Fine tremors began in the center of my bones, the body coming down from a sudden adrenaline ramp-up and successive shocks. I shook so hard my coat creaked, responding to my weight shifts. An internal earthquake, and me without any seismic bracing.

Jill, you’re not thinking straight. You could have handled him, gotten more information. You’re beginning to blur under the pressure, who wouldn’t? You have got to get some rest.

Yeah. Great idea. Unfortunately, like all great ideas, this one had a fatal flaw. There was no rest to be had.

Not if one of the most powerful hellbreed in the city—and one that had a reason to bear me a grudge—was sending ’breed to kill me in my own house. But why would she send a callow idiot like this, one who didn’t know the first thing about hunters?

One who hesitated before attacking me?

It didn’t make any sense.

I gathered my dropped weapons with shaking hands, tacked out across the broad expanse of floor for the kitchen. A sudden shrill sound yanked me halfway out of my skin, guns clearing leather with both hands and fastened on the disturbance—that is, in the direction of my bedroom.

The phone was ringing. I tried not to feel like an idiot as I reholstered my guns.

It never rains but it pours. Black humor tilted under the surface of the words. I made it to the kitchen, letting the phone ring, the noise sawing across my nerves. A cupboard squeaked when I opened it, and I lifted down the bottle of Jim Beam as carefully as if it was a Fabergé egg. Jesus. Jesus Christ.

The habit of drinking helps more than you’d think with something like this.

The ringing stopped. The answering machine clicked on. The same few seconds of silence as always, then a hiss of inhaled breath, static blurring over the line as he started to speak.

“Kiss.” Carp sounded ragged. “Goddammit, Kismet, answer your fuckin’ phone. Pick up if you’re there.”

Sorry, honey. No can do. I uncapped the bottle, took a healthy draft. It burned all the way down, but the heat helped to steady me. My metabolism burns off alcohol like nobody’s business, but it’s still… comforting.

“Things are gettin fuckin’ ridiculous,” he continued, the words spilling over each other. “Jesus. There’s a lead. If you’re there, if you get this message, there’s this place downtown on First and Alohambra. It’s a club, the Kat Klub. I got a line on someone who knows something, she works there. A waitress named Irene. I’m goin’ in.”

My heart did its best to strangle me by climbing up into my throat. I slammed the bottle on the counter, sloshing the amber liquid inside, and bolted for the bedroom.

“Carp!” I yelled, pointlessly. “Goddamit!” As if he could hear me. But he hung up before I could scoop the handset out of its cradle.

“Shit!” I yelled, and almost hurled the damn thing across the room. “Oh, fuck. Fuckitall, no.”

I barely paused to grab a dose of ammunition, wriggle into a fresh T-shirt and leather pants—the ones I wore smelled of hellbreed, gas, and burning vinyl, as did my coat—and to take another long jolt off the bottle before hitting the door at a run.

Please, God, don’t let me be too late.