The Devil's Right Hand

Chapter 12

The first train I could catch from the station rocketed across the landscape on its cushion of antigrav, part of a rail network so old the banks on either side of the tracks have risen to overshadow the sleek trains in some places. That bounced the antigrav back at itself and made everything feel queer and light, but it was a quick way for me to get out of Toscano and to a major Hegemony city—in this case, the great hub of Franjlyon. Once in a big city, I was confident I could hide—but out in the Historical Preserve I stood out like a black-market augment at a Ludder convention.

In Franjlyon I could catch transport for anywhere and start plugging into the bounty-hunter network. If I could find a few Magi, I might have a fighting chance of staying alive for a little while; I also had a fighting chance of staying out of sight for a few days. If I could find a Magi—circle or solitary—I could persuade to part with a few trade secrets, my chances would get even better. Screw decoding old shadowjournals. I wanted to find out what I was and if I would turn back into a human once Japh was a full demon instead of A’nankhimel.

I was getting to the point of not being too choosy about how I extracted that information, either.

I settled myself deeper into my seat, wishing I could find a way to make the carriage a little darker. I wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, with the tat on my cheek, the emerald glittering there too, my sword and guns, and the flawless lovely architecture of my face. I had grown a little more used to seeing a holovid model’s face in the mirror, but it was still a horrendous jolt if I wasn’t ready for it. Lots of normals did double- and triple-takes, as if I was a holovid star gone slumming. Or as if I was a psion. Ha ha.

It wasn’t so much the overlay of demon beauty that bothered me. It was that every time I caught sight of my face in the mirror, I had a weird double image—my old human face, tired and familiar but changed, turned into loveliness even I had trouble looking at. I hated even catching glimpses of myself in windows, like I was doing now.

I focused out the window, seeing nothing but strips of orandflu lighting and the meaningless smear that was the ghost of my face. Orange stripes blurred together, telling me the hovertrain was gliding along with no trouble at all in the reactive-greased furrow we still called “tracks” even though no train had run on tracks since about twenty years after the discovery of reactive and antigrav.

That’s great, Danny. Think about historical trivia instead of how you’re going to stay alive past tomorrow. If demons are looking for you, the world gets really small really quick, and I’m not exactly inconspicuous. I even smell like a demon—good luck hiding.

Nobody else was in the compartment. I’d been alone since I boarded the train. Not many tourists took the red-eye from Turin Station to Franjlyon.

My eyes dropped to the silver cuff on my left wrist. It sank into my skin, and the gap between the curved ends seemed smaller. I couldn’t believe I’d fit even my wrist through there. When I’d been human my wrists had been big, corded with muscle from years of daily sword drill. Now they were thinner, looking frail even though they held a great deal of strength in their flawlessly powerful demon bones and claw structure.

The cuff felt good, though my left hand was frozen around my scabbard. I reached over with my right hand, touched the fluid etched lines. It was beautiful. Japhrimel had never given me an ugly present. Was it from him, or was it something I shouldn’t have picked up? One of Lucifer’s little jokes?

I wondered if it was a tracking device. But it felt so impossibly right, snugged against my wrist as if made for me. I couldn’t quite bring myself to take it off, despite the uneasy idea that perhaps the bracelet was growing closed around my wrist.

I looked out the window again. Rested my head against the back of the seat. The black demon blood I’d wiped in my hair smelled like perfumed fruit, absorbing back into black silky strands.

The trouble with traveling like this was that I had too much time to brood.

I sat there mulling over the situation and not coming up with anything fresh for a good two hours. The train bulleted through a mountain tunnel, the peculiar directionless sense of being underground raising my hackles. I needed a quiet stationary room and some time to myself—and some food. I was beginning to feel a little strange, lightheaded, as if I was going into shock. The world was going gray, color leaching out of the orange strips outside the window, the blue pleather seat across from me losing its shine, a sort of fuzz creeping over my vision.

I closed my eyes but that made it worse.

The train rocketed out from under the mountain, and the mark on my shoulder began to tingle.

There was no sound but the whining lull of the train and a faraway murmur of other minds, human minds full of the random stink of normal human psyches. I reached up with my right hand, touched the mark through my shirt, rubbed at it. If I touched it with my bare fingers I would see out Japhrimel’s eyes. It was very, very tempting—though if I looked out his eyes and into Hell, would I come away from the experience quite sane?

The thought that the scar might burn off my skin if he became a demon again was unpleasant, to say the least. I racked my brain for demon sigils and magickal theory but couldn’t come up with anything that applied even vaguely. I didn’t have a clue what would happen, and that was uncomfortable. To say the least.

I blindly trusted him the same way I’d blindly trusted Jace. But Jace had been human… and Jace had ended up giving up his life for me. Japhrimel had given up his power as a demon, shackling himself to me, and there was a time when I could have sworn he didn’t care.

Maybe going back into Hell without me last night had made him care again. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered.

How quaint. I’m pretty much a dismal failure at relationships with two species now.

No. He’d said he would come back. He had promised. I was just going to have to wait and see.

Wonderful. My favorite kind of magickal riddle: one where you just sit and wait for the unpleasantness to begin.

I wasn’t an idiot. I knew I had trust issues. Plenty of bounty hunters do. You don’t go into bounty hunting without being a little paranoid, and if you survive you get even more paranoid. My parents had left me before I was ten days old, my social worker had left me for Death’s country, my friends—when I made them at all—either betrayed me or died as well. Except for Gabe.

Always excepting Gabe.

And let’s not even talk about my lovers. I’m overreacting. Who wouldn’t overreact, when Lucifer starts playing with them? Japhrimel will come back, Dante. He promised.

Still, I wondered. I doubted.

I rubbed at my shoulder through my shirt, rubbed it and rubbed it. The buzzing, prickling tingle in the mark intensified.

Then it gave one incredible, crunching flare of pain that ate right through the gray blanket of shock. I sat bolt upright, four inches of steel leaping free of the sheath, disappearing as I shoved the sword back home. There was no enemy to kill here—just one flare after another of deep grinding pain in my shoulder.

What if the mark vanishes? What will I do then? I tried to focus on my breathing, deep and serene.

The trouble was, I felt less than serene. My entire body ached for Japhrimel. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep; in fact, I’d probably go insane from lack of rest. I’d survived almost a year without him before, but the bond between us was too established by now. My research, fragmented as it was, told me one thing for sure, I certainly couldn’t break it.

But with a demon’s power, he might be able to.

Will you stop it, Dante? He’ll come back for you. It’s just when we have to worry about.

The pain in my shoulder eased little by little. I tucked my chin, reached up, and pulled my shirt away from my chest. Ropy lines of scarring twisted in the golden-skinned hollow of my shoulder, looking decorative rather than scarlike. They also flushed a deep, angry red.

An amazing, searing bolt of Power hit the mark, spreading down my skin like oil. My hips jerked forward as my head snapped aside and I gasped, suddenly glad there was nobody in the compartment with me. The hovertrain rocked slightly on its cushion, I gulped down stale recycled air, panting. It felt like I’d just slammed a hypo of caffeine-laden aphrodisiac, pleasure spilling and swirling through my veins, tautening my body like a harpstring.

The cuff on my wrist reacted, etched lines suddenly swirling with green light. I tipped my left hand over and stared at the design, fascinated, as the lines moved on the metal, shaping themselves into patterns I could almost recognize. They looked like demon glyphs, mutating and twisting, as beautiful as they were alien—and as beautiful as their language was hurtful.

What’s it doing? I probed at it delicately with my nonphysical senses, felt nothing. Was it just a decoration, a pretty but useless thing? If it kept glowing I was going to have problems—it would be hard to hide.

I tipped into a half-trance, looking at the colored lines sway and slide over the metal’s surface, still probing at it. For all magickal intents and purposes, it was invisible. That in itself was strange, as most things have a psychic “echo” of one kind or another.

The Power continued pulsing down my skin, each successive wave deeper and warmer. It was nice, I supposed—but why? Was Japhrimel reaching for his mark on my skin, trying to locate me? Did that mean he was out of Hell and feeling frisky?

I will always come for you.

Was he looking for me? I hoped like hell he was. But staying one step ahead of demon assassins might also make it hard for him to find me.

This drowsy, dreamy thought occurred to me as I stared at the cuff’s little lightshow. I blinked.

When I looked again, the lines were frozen into a single symbol.

Hegethusz, one of the Nine Canons. Shaped like a backward-leaning angular H with a slash through it, a simple stark rune of a simple stark nature.

The Rune of Danger.

There was only one door. I rocked up to my feet, reached it in two steps and slid it aside, pressing the lock-lever. Any transport employee would have the keycode for the outside lock, so it would be easy to pick out of an unprotected brain. Just one more reason why people feared psions. If you didn’t mind getting a wash of uncoordinated jumbled filth with any usable information, a psion could probably do all the things normals were so afraid of. The thought of the effort it would take to clean out my mind after pickpocketing something from a normal’s head made my skin crawl.

The corridor between the windows on the other side of the train and the blank plasteel walls broken by doors into individual compartments was barely wide enough for an anorexic techna-groupie to get through. I turned my back to the windows—I was fairly sure any incoming fire wouldn’t be coming from there, we were going too fast—and stuffed my sword in the loop on my rig. The corridor was too narrow for swordplay, and if I had to do knifework I didn’t want to do it here.

So it was guns. I slid the two projectile guns out of their holsters. A plasbolt might interact with any reactive paint on the outside of the hovertrain, and I had no desire to see another reaction fire up close. I was glad the train was all but empty. Collateral damage was not something I wanted happening if I could help it. Silly of me to worry—demons were sneaky, powerful, and not overly concerned with loss of human life. I was already playing under a handicap and worrying about casualties would make it worse.

I edged down the train toward the back, one gun on either side, my arms stretched out. If any normals came out I was going to look silly—and if anything else showed up I would shoot it. Please don’t let anyone out. Let them all stay in their compartments. If I have to shoot please don’t let me hit anyone innocent, Anubis witness my plea, please don’t let me hit anyone.

The mark on my shoulder pulsed again, another soft wave of Power sliding down my skin, burrowing in toward my bones. Why? What was happening?

I couldn’t afford to holster a gun and reach up to touch the mark. If he could track me through the scar, could another demon do so too? I shone through the ambient landscape of Power like a demon myself, but without the heavy-duty shielding Japhrimel carried. Stuck between two worlds, too strong for human psions and too weak to combat demons, I was just powerful enough to be visible and not powerful enough to protect myself if a serious demon came gunning for me. And this was the second attack in twelve hours.

I was really racking up the score in this gravball game.

My feet shuffling soundlessly, I covered both ends of the train, looking back and forth, wishing I had eyestalks like the Chery Family bodyguards were all augmented with. It would have been good to be able to see both ways at once.

I felt it, then. A quick fluttering brush against my shields, retreating almost as soon as it occurred. Training took over, clamped down on my hindbrain as adrenaline flooded my system. Too much adrenal juice and I’d be a jittery mess. Other trained mental reflexes locked down the direction, complex metaphysical calculations and intuition all slicing in an arc that pinpointed the location.

That smell again—ice-cold moonlight, wet ratfur—assaulted my nostrils. The thing that had thrown my tracker and disappeared—or something that smelled like it—was now on the train. Probably just appearing out of thin air, the way demons had a nasty habit of doing that according to the demonology texts. Especially the Lesser and Low Flights. The Greater Flight liked more dramatic entrances.

At least some of my grueling, piecemeal demonology research was now useful. I knew that some demons could send the Lesser or Low Flight of Hell to do their bidding in the human world. If the demon had enough Power… or if the demon was given permission by Lucifer.

Lucifer’s permission was invoked before every conjuration a Magi solitary or circle attempted to bring a demon through, and I got the idea from Japhrimel that there was a bureaucracy in place to handle the requests. Since Magi were traditionally so jealous of the methods they found to weaken the walls between the world and Hell to get their messages through, it sometimes it took years for the proper method to be found to reach a demon one could control or make a familiar. No Magi ever attempted to contact more than the very lowest echelons of the Lesser Flight. If a Greater Flight demon showed up in a Magi’s conjuring circle, the practitioner was either especially lucky or incredibly painfully doomed.

Most likely the latter.

Demons weren’t under that type of restriction. It was thought fairly easy for a Greater Flight demon to bring a Lesser Flight demon through, and even easier for them to bring one of the Low Flight.

Which all added up to bad news for Danny Valentine.

I turned my back to the rear of the hovertrain. Backed up one slow step at a time, the guns held steady, pointed down the front of the corridor, Power beginning to glow in my hands. The bullets alone might not do much against whatever this thing was, but hot lead wedded to fiery Power made a lethal combination for most things. It wasn’t as elegant as blessed steel, and it was so messy and draining not many psions could do it—but I was no longer human, for however much longer I wore Japhrimel’s mark. As long as I had the capability, I might as well use it.

I had almost reached the end of the train when it came for me.

Hovertrains are long flexible snakes, each plasteel carriage connected to the next by plasreactive cloth. This means that pleats of the material separate the compartments, rattling and flexing as the hovertrain twists, bounces, and curves its way through a shallow, reactive-laden groove that provides the necessary relief from friction and gravity. This also meant I was staring down a long corridor lit only with orandflu light and fluorescent tubes in thickly grilled floor divots, watching the tunnel stretch and twist like the digestive tract of some huge creature, when a small, pulsing movement alerted me.

It melted out of the shadows, crawling forward on hands and feet—and when I say hands and feet, I mean that its palms rested flat against the floor, fingers spread, claws extended. Its feet were flat on the floor too, which made its femurs rotate oddly in their sockets. Human ballai dancers would have sold their souls to have that kind of turnout.

It was vaguely human-shaped, white-skinned like the underbelly of a blind fish, with black diamond teardrops painted over its eyes making them into oubliettes. Its ears came up to high sharp points on either side of its oily bald head, and my skin went cold.

The face was different, thank the gods. It wasn’t Santino’s face.

This was a ruined chubby dollface twisted up like a demented child’s, with soft cheeks and pudgy lips. It wore the remains of a red robe, tied at the waist with a bit of what looked like hemp cord; but the robe was kilted up by its posture and I saw its genitals flapping loose.

Well, now we know where the expression “three-balled imp” comes from. The lunatic desire to laugh rose inside my chest as it always did. Why did I always feel the urge to laugh at times like this?

If I hadn’t been studying what I could of Magi-coded demonology all these years, the resemblance to Santino might have made me start to scream. Instead, I held my ground, pointing the guns at it, thanking the gods again that the compartments around me were empty. I didn’t want anyone caught in this crossfire.

It was a demon, a scavenger. One of the Low Flight, I was betting, since it looked like something I could possibly kill if I had a lot of luck. It stood to reason that if some of the larger demons had escaped, one or more of them might have brought a few friends.

No other demon was on the train, though. I would have bet my life on it—I was going to bet my life on it.

It was a demon, and I was only a hedaira—but I was hedaira to the Devil’s assassin himself, at least until the mark faded—if it faded. I hoped that was enough to buy me my miserable life. I maybe overmatched the imp in Power, but it might have more speed—especially since it was born in a demon’s body, and I still didn’t have complete control over my inhuman-fast reflexes. The close quarters favored it, it was smaller. I would have preferred edged metal when dealing with this thing, but beggars can’t be choosers.

All this flitted through my mind in less time than it takes an unregistered hooker to vanish from a Patrol. Then it coiled on itself, its terrible child’s face twisting and slavering, and threw itself down the hall at me.

I squeezed both triggers, the recoil jolting all the way up to my shoulders; Power tore out from me too, matching the physical velocity of the bullets. I had no time to care about stray fire catching anyone else now that the fun had started. Again, again, again, tracking the thing, it was unholy quick, throwing myself backward, got to get enough speed got to get enough speed—

The kia burst from me as my back hit the rear of the hovertrain. Metal squealed. Physics, insulted, took her due revenge, and I tumbled out of the speeding hovertrain with the imp’s left-hand claws sinking into my chest.