Redemption Alley

Chapter Two

The phone shrilled. I rolled over, blinking hazily. My bed was rucked out of all recognition, blankets tossed everywhere and my clothes in a stinking pile on the floor next to the mattresses. I’d been too tired to shower when I got home midmorning—just shucking off, putting a knife under the pillow, and passing out in the square of sunlight that travels through the skylight every day.

If you’re not nocturnal when you start out, being a hunter will make you that way before long. Afternoon is the best, a long slow sleepy time of safe daylight. Dusk will wake you up like gunfire, because darkness is when the nightside comes out to play. Sunlight means safety.

At least most of the time.

I was just going to let the machine take it. But the thought that Saul might be calling when he knew I was probably home brought me up out of deep dreamlessness and set me fumbling for the phone. I hit the talk button and managed to get it in the vicinity of my face. “’Lo?” Saul? Is that you?

There was a moment’s worth of silence, and I knew just from the sound of breathing that it wasn’t my very favorite werecougar. Cold water ran down my spine and I lunged up into full wakefulness a bare second before a low, throaty chuckle echoed in my ear and made the scar on my wrist run with wet heat.

“My darling Kiss,” he said. “It has been too long.”

I knew he hadn’t forgotten me.

It’d be nice if he would, wouldn’t it, Jill? My mouth turned dry and slick as desert glass, and the scar thundered under its leather hood. The buckles on the cuffs Saul made for me regularly snapped off or corroded, and I didn’t help matters by tearing off the cuff when I needed the full extent of helltainted strength.

I didn’t move to sit up in bed. Perry would hear material moving and know he’d gotten to me. Instead, I froze, lying on my belly, one hand under the pillow around the knifehilt and the other clutching the phone to my numb ear.

I’d wondered just how much chain he was going to give me before yanking. I’d left town six months ago in the aftermath of the Sorrows incident, and on my way out I’d paid Perry a little visit. I knew he’d been in it up to his eyeballs, thinking he could play both sides of the fence and use the Sorrows to get his wormy little fingers inside my head.

It hadn’t worked. I’d spent a lot of time between then and now wondering when he was going to make his next move. The scar didn’t twinge much, and it still functioned the same as before, feeding me enough etheric force to make me exponentially more dangerous.

It’s not every hunter who has a tainted hellbreed mark. It’s saved my life more than once.

And driven me right to the edge of the abyss.

“Perry.” I sounded normal. Or about as normal as you can sound, awakened from a deep sleep with a hellbreed on the line. My palms were wet and my nipples, pressed against the mattress since I’d shucked every stitch of smoke-fouled clothing, were hard as chips of rock. I’d tossed most of the pillows off the bed. “Didn’t I tell you not to bother me?”

I didn’t even have to put any fuck you into my voice. Just weariness, as if I was dealing with a spoiled child.

Oh be careful. Be very goddamn careful, Jill. My pulse kicked up as if it was dusk. High, hard, and fast, right in my throat, too.

“Would you like my mark to start spreading, Kiss?” Bland, smooth, and even, as if he was discussing the weather. I could almost see his blue eyes narrowing.

Most of the damned are beautiful. Perry is just blandly mediocre-looking. It’s why he’s so goddamn scary, and why my left hand started to quiver a little bit.

The woman always has advantage in situation like this, my teacher Mikhail’s voice whispered from the vaults of memory.

I hoped he was right. It sure as hell didn’t feel like it, sometimes.

“Or perhaps,” Perry continued, “you would like it to start rotting and turning black. I believe the proper term is necrosis.”

I know what necrosis is, hellspawn. “That would put a little wrinkle in our bargain.” I didn’t swallow audibly only out of sheer force of will. “And since you’re already in dutch by cavorting with the Sorrows not so long ago—”

“Oh, let’s not fight. Come see me, Kiss.” Silky-smooth, his voice could have been an attractive businessman’s baritone except for the rumble behind it. It sounded like freight trains in a deserted switchyard at midnight, rubbing against each other and groaning in pain.

Helletöng. The language of the damned.

The mother tongue of Hell.

“Hold your breath until I show up, Pericles.” I peeled the phone away from my ear and hit the talk button again. It disconnected—but not nearly quickly enough to suit me.

I rolled over and stared at the skylight. Late-afternoon sunlight filled the Plexiglas rectangle with gold. I was under the messy blankets, except for my bare foot, with the sheet wrapped around my ankle like a manacle. My toes flexed as sunlight scoured my vision, comfortable safety filling the inside of my skull with white noise. I tuned my mind to a blank, meaningless hum, but my hands were shaking, one of them braced with a knifehilt.

My warehouse resounded with tiny noises. I like to hear every little thing moving in my place, right down to the mice in the walls. Though sorcery is sometimes practically useful—I don’t have mice in my walls. Creaks as sun-heat made the building expand, the low moan of the wind from the desert, a faraway rumble as a train slid along the tracks, since I live in an industrial district. Nowadays I was liking the solitude more and more.

You knew he wouldn’t forget about you. I was cold even under the blankets. The scar, under its shield of leather, ran with moist warmth. It wasn’t much to look at, a puckered lip-print as if someone had painted lye on the skin and kissed with a wet mouth. It still functioned the way it always had, feeding me etheric force, hiking my physical strength and just generally making me a lot harder to kill.

I hadn’t been in to the Monde Nuit to give Perry payment for that power since Saul and I returned from the Dakotas.

I was all right with that. And technically, he had betrayed the bargain we’d made. I was within my rights never to darken the Monde’s doorstep again, never to make another payment no matter how much power I pulled through it.

It’s too easy. And it was. Perry wasn’t the sort to let a hunter slip through his immaculate fingers. He’d miscalculated badly last time, and I’d outwitted him.

Hellbreed don’t like that.

Add to that the fact that he’d done a few things I hadn’t suspected he could—like producing hellfire in the blue spectrum—and you had a very unsettling situation developing.

Worry about it later, Jill. For right now you need to get up and start poking around after Monty’s dead partner. The sooner you get that looked into, the sooner you can get back to those disappearances on the east side of town. Four women gone, and the whole thing stinks.

The trouble was, I might have to wait until someone else disappeared before I was sure last night’s player didn’t have anything to do with the situation. But the fire-slinging sonofabitch hadn’t bothered going out to the east, he’d concentrated slightly south of downtown, in the warehouses and freight yards near the river. Lots of places to hide where nobody could hear a woman scream.

Regan Smith had been the lucky one. Her mother hadn’t been able to look me in the face when she asked me to find her daughter, or when I left her outside the curtain to the ER bay her child was behind. Maybe it was my eyes. Maybe it was my long leather coat or the skintight black T-shirt, or the silver tied in my hair.

Maybe it was even the guns. Or the bullwhip.

Or maybe it was her raped, traumatized daughter whimpering even through the sedation. Sometimes people aren’t prepared for their loved ones to be brought back hurt or marred. The disappearance itself throws everything off, screws everything up, and life is never normal again even if their loved one comes back.

That was Perry on the phone. A galvanic shudder spilled through me, from top to toes. He’s about to start messing with you again, Jill. It figures he would wait until Saul is out of town.

I wanted to call Saul, but he would immediately be able to tell something was wrong. He didn’t need another burden right now. He already sounded too worried. When he could get me on the phone, that is.

I repressed another shiver. I could still smell smoke, my clothes on the floor sending out invisible waves of stink like Pig-Pen in the old Peanuts cartoons.

I should get up, work out, and hit the street.

For a few minutes I lay there, breathing, my eyes full of light. Trying not to follow the inevitable chain of logic.

You know what this means. Perry’s thinking about you.

I wished it didn’t make me feel so unsteady. He’d almost gotten into my head more than once. Almost pushed me over that edge every hunter lives on.

We commit murder on an almost daily basis. It doesn’t matter if it’s hellbreed, Trader, scurf, Middle Way adepts, what-have-you. It’s still killing sentient beings. The fact that most of these sentient beings are kill-crazy predators doesn’t absolve a hunter of responsibility.

The Church, after all, does not admit us into Heaven, even if we’re buried in hallowed ground.

Sometimes I wonder about that. I wonder more and more, the longer I do this sort of work.

Getting that close to the edge is necessary. You can’t kill a hellbreed if you hesitate or flinch. But no matter how close you get to that edge, no matter how you put your little toesies on it and peer over into the howling abyss that lies beyond, you cannot go over. It’s a razor-thin line, but you cannot, ever, go over it.

I had been so close.

Get up, Jill. Work out, and go out and do your job. Let Perry suck eggs in his little hellbreed hole. When he pops back up you’ll deal with him.

It sounded good.

I just wished I believed it.

I rolled up out of bed, taking the knife with me, and got ready to face another night.