The Devil's Right Hand

Chapter 38

We jolted down the stairs and burst out into the music. The werecain guard at the door was gone. I checked my datband, lifting my left hand, weighted with my sword.

Quarter to midnight. I was beginning to think I might still be alive and not dead of shock. Power spiking in the air cleared my head, and I noticed the crotch of my panties was uncomfortably damp. I had never responded like that before. Never.

She was Doreen’s child, and maybe mine. That I reacted to her was a shameful secret, nothing more. She did, after all, wear my dead lover’s face. I wasn’t attracted to her, I told myself. No, I was simply determined to keep Doreen’s daughter from being dragged back into Hell or killed to salve Lucifer’s fucking pride.

I’ve had just about enough of the Devil. My eyes found the wristcuff snugged above my datband.

The cuff ran with fluid lines of green fire, settling into a frozen, scratched rune, a backwards-leaning spiked H.

Danger.

Yeah, like I don’t already know that. I was beginning to feel like myself again. If Japhrimel had known it was Eve instead of Lucifer here… had he guessed? Why had he thought Lucifer wanted a little chat with me again? Leonidas hadn’t named the demon wanting to see me, and I wondered about that too.

Forget it, Dante. Now it’s time to move.

The dance floor still pulsed with writhing bodies. My awareness swept through the interior, and found the swanhild gone. That was interesting. Something feral stalked closer, if I could feel it the ’hilds certainly could, with their exquisite sensitivity to predators.

I took a deep breath tainted with synth-hash and followed Lucas’s rigid, bandolier-crossed back through the press of Nichtvren flesh, was jostled by a werecain who snarled at me. The mark on my shoulder heated up again, a live brand pressed into my flesh. It hurt, scorching through the layers of gray numbness threatening me.

I almost welcomed the pain. I wished Japhrimel was behind me. Sure, he was a lying bastard—but right now I was feeling very much like I might not get out of this tangled web without him.

I can’t believe I just thought that. He refused to kill me to go back to Hell. He gave up his home for me.

Yeah, and he just “forgot” to mention Eve was out of Hell and giving the Devil a run for his money. Sure he did.

We were halfway across the dance floor when Lucas veered, taking a course that would bring us out near the stage and a glowing green sign in Cyrillic that probably said exit. I kept my sword in both hands, left on the scabbard, right on the hilt. The back of my neck prickled, running chills sliding down the shallow channel of my spine. I felt cold even in the middle of the heat and flux of Power, desire draining away and leaving me aching, unsatisfied. A roar went up from the bar—some kobolding playing a drinking game. The kobolding bartender, however, had his back to the mirrored wall holding glass shelves of bottles and stasis cabinets for cloned blood and other things. His yellow eyes glittered as he sniffed. He scanned the place suspiciously, lifting his gray lumpen head.

The shadows thickened near the bar, and I caught sight of a familiar shape. Broad shoulders under a black T-shirt, a black leather Mob assassin’s rig, a shock of wheat-gold hair. Recognition slammed through me, and instant denial.

It couldn’t be.

I stopped dead on the dance floor, buffeted by moving Nichtvren on all sides. I stared, going up on my toes to get a clearer view.

The man—was it a man? Not in DMZ Sarajevo. But he reached out with one hand and touched a staff leaning against the bar. The staff stood taller then his head, and small bones tied to it with raffia twine clacked as his fingers touched it. That small sound cut through the music and welter of Power, spilling prickles through my veins. My nipples tightened, I gasped.

He swung around. Blue eyes flashed.

Jace Monroe regarded me across a throng of thrashing Nichtvren. He lifted his sword, and I realized I could see through him, as if he was made of colored smoke.

I am a Necromance, death is my trade. But I had never seen anything like this. Most ghostflits are pale gray smoke, not colorfully lifelike. And this was not where he had died. This was not where his ashes were, the cremains a Necromance could use to bring his apparition through to ask questions—if she was powerful enough. This was not a place Jace had haunted in life.

He should not be haunting it now.

The ghost grinned at me, raising his sheathed dotanuki, the same blade that had hung above the altar in the Toscano villa, bent and corkscrewed with the agony of his last strike and death still ringing in the metal. Only his ghost held the sword as it had been, unbent, true and familiar.

My right hand crept up to touch the shape of the necklace under my shirt.

He winked at me. Then his face grew grave, and his lips shaped three words.

Run, Danny. Run.

The strength spilled out of my legs. I would have fallen except for the press of Nichtvren flesh around me. The ghost of my dead lover shook his head, the same way he used to when I was too slow during a sparring session.

Go. I heard the word clearly, laid in the shell of my ear, Jace’s breath on my nape. My entire body tightened, heat spilling into my lower belly again, my panties soaked as if I’d been necking like a heated Academy teenager. What the hell was wrong with me?

I. Am. Not. A. Sexwitch.

Lucas’s hand closed around my upper arm again. He made a spitting sound and hauled on me, and I went willingly. We forced our way through the crush of the dance floor, Lucas shouldering aside a pair of Nichtvren Acolytes poured into matching red pleather outfits. We freed ourselves from the press just as the entire building shivered.

Lucas swore. He let go of me—I was thankfully able to walk on my own now. His hands came up with a 60-watt plasgun in each. I jammed my sword into the loop on my belt, keeping my right hand on the hilt. I drew steel, and my newly freed left hand closed around my own plasgun just as all hell broke loose. Again.