Blood spattered the scarred, ancient black-and-white linoleum squares. I scrabbled through on all fours, rolled while sweeping, and was on one knee with the gun braced as Anya plunged through behind me.
I was right. I could see the damage from my last visit. The monstrous wooden reception desk had a hole blown in it, a jumble of wooden chairs and trash at one end of the room vibrated uneasily, and Saul was on the stairs holding down a writhing, spitting mass of paleness that had once been Jughead Vanner. The hellhound had tossed Jughead aside to deal with us, the bigger threat.
Might have saved his life. Goddamn.
One booted foot off to the side, his coppery fingers clamped on Vanner’s nape, my Were glanced at me and his dark eyes widened slightly.
“Status!” Anya yelled.
I coughed, spat. Etheric force tingled all through me, and my left arm cramped up as the gem fought whatever toxin had been smeared on the thing’s teeth. Or in its blood-foaming saliva. Or whatever.
The world trembled and came back, the Hill shivering all over. “Jill! ” Anya didn’t sound happy.
Buckle up, Kismet. Just buckle up. “Fine!” I barked, and shook the whip slightly. I had to swing my shoulder back and forth to do it, my arm had seized up. “Ready to tango. Saul?”
“He’s strong.” Quiet, clinical. “You’re bleeding.”
Well, no shit. That’s how these things always end up. “I’ll live, it’s closing up. Devi?”
“What do you wanna bet that hound isn’t coming back?” She moved back and to her left, finding a good angle, both guns covering the door. Outside our little spheres of normalcy, the air was thicker. Almost opaque, like dust-fogged glass. Paper trash twisted and ruffled at random, half-seen shapes flickering and my blue eye burning as it tried to focus through.
“I don’t take losing bets.” I levered myself up, coughed rackingly again. Move it, Jill. “Saul, what’s wrong with him? Is he bit?” A hellhound bite could do any number of things to a person.
Bad things.
“Don’t know.” Saul’s back tensed as Vanner writhed, bare toenails scratching the linoleum. The stairs groaned sharply, once. “Steady, friend.”
It was hard work to lever myself up and turn my back on the door, even though I knew Anya was watching. My ribs ached, and my left arm flopped a little, huge jagged waves of pins-and-needles cramping up from my fingers, exploding in my shoulder, sliding down to grip at my ribs, grinding in my knees each time my boots hit the floor. Half-heard voices rose in a whispering tide, little unseen fingers tickling the edges of my vision. The bright spangles tipping each spike of my aura winked uneasily, little stars. “It’s bad in here. Jesus.”
“Something happened.” Devi, carefully neutral. “My guess is that fucking blue-eyed ’breed was in it up to his neck.” She paused. “And Belisa.”
Yeah, I noticed my apprentice had the Eye. Subtle, Devi. “So it would seem.” I approached cautiously, each step tested before I committed my weight. Thin traceries of steam rose from my flayed sleeve. “I’m cuffing Vanner.”
“You sure it’s him? Maybe it’s his cousin.”
“I’ll revise my assumption when I get to him.” The banter was supposed to soothe our nerves. I don’t know how well it was doing for her, but for me, not so good. My arm came back to life in a scalding rush, and the flechettes on the whip’s end jingled merrily as I stowed it. My fingers were finally obeying me again.
She magnanimously didn’t mention that I’d pulled a rookie mistake and gotten myself hit. Nice of her.
Saul had our victim’s right arm twisted up behind his back so far it looked ready to separate the ball joint; along with the knee in his back and the lock at his nape it looked reasonably secure. Which was wrong. Because even a weakened Were should have no trouble at all holding down a human, especially one that presumably had been lolling catatonic in a chair for months and shagging ass all over the city for the past couple days.
Oh yeah. This just keeps getting better.
21
It was Jughead Vanner, and something was seriously wrong with him. There was so much blood I couldn’t tell if he’d been bitten. The reinforced silver-coated cuffs went at his wrists and elbows, and I flipped him over while Saul straightened, glancing mildly around like he was interested in the scenery.
“Jesus,” I muttered, and the memory of the last time I’d seen Vanner hit me right in the gut. It was that house. The one with the dead girls a hellbreed had harvested organs from, the girls that got up and started moving while I was there. Vanner had come in—maybe to help, maybe to gawk, even though he knew the rules.
They all did. When I say stay, they stay like good little boys and girls.
Back then Vanner had been a big lumbering rookie, blue-eyed corn-fed All-American steak with a habit of blushing and stammering whenever I spoke to him. Now he was wasted down to pasty skin, bruised crescents of shocky flesh under his rolling eyes and the remains of a filthy, bloodsoaked hospital johnny covering a skinny torso that had once been an advertisement for weightlifting. He’d found a pair of canvas pants, too, and God alone knew what color they were originally. Now they were stained, smeared with sixteen different flavors of street grease and claret, and he’d lost control of some very basic functions most of us get a handle on before we’re three.
Wonderful.
I grabbed Vanner’s unshaven chin. The hair on his cheeks was more stubborn than the mop on his head, once leonine blond and high and tight, but now just a few soft strands over a naked white domed scalp. His jaw worked loosely, spittle drooling down his chin, and he shrieked.
The Hill shrieked back.
Mottled rashing burns spread down Vanner’s throat, a distinctive bright-red wattling. Like radiation. The other skin was dead white, and it rippled as his back bowed and he shrieked again.
Ohshit. “Vanner?” I snapped. “Vanner! ” I found his first name with a lurching mental effort. “Christopher! ”
He moaned, far gone, eyes rolling up, their whites yellowed as old teeth. His bare heels drummed into the linoleum as I wrestled him back down. “Something in him all right. Can’t tell what it—”
“Jill!” Devi moved forward, light even steps. “Incoming!”
Poor Vanner. He’d run so hard, and so long, and he had reached the end of it. There was a boom and a snarling of Helletöng as the hellhound hit Henderson Hill’s front door, and the skin over the parasite-thing breeding in a Santa Luz cop, one of my cops, peeled back and burst.
The unhuman shape came up out of him in a looping stream that resolved itself into a narrow canine head, sharp needle teeth made of basalt and slick eggwhite ectoplasm clinging along it. Bones crackled, forelimbs lengthening and hindlegs shortening, muscle roiling and shifting as it assumed its shape. The ’plasm splattered, and the bits of it that hit the Hill’s turbulence hung in midair, spinning little milky spheres. I was chanting myself now, bastard Latin strung together in an ancient prayer pagans had stolen and Christians had stolen back, and thin blue lines of sorcery snapped into being. My apprentice-ring sparked, the three charms in my hair did too, and I went over backward. The whip doubled and looped, caught just over the thing’s head, locked up as its teeth champed an inch from my nose. It had mad, wide blue eyes burning with unholy fire, and it was slick-wet with the noisome fluid of its birth. Short blond hair bristled all over its hyena-shaped body, and for a single sickening moment my blue eye saw Vanner himself in the thing, his hands turned to needle-fine but lethal razor claws and his entire body a lean compact weight. Like a nightmare the thing scrabbled at my chest, and another massive sound was the hellhound and Anya screaming at each other, gunfire popping and Saul’s enraged roar.
This is not good not good not good—my fingers, slick with ectoplasmic goo, didn’t slip. I tightened up, shoving the thing back, and it choked, spraying me with more foulness. Goddammit, get up and help them! That’s a hellhound! Saul’s over there! Fucking kill this thing, get up and kill the other thing, and le
t’s get this done!
The gem shrieked, a crystalline, overstressed note, glass tearing apart instead of breaking. Red pain jolted up my arm, exploding in my shoulder, and for a long moment it was Perry with his lips on my skin again, the scar melting with sick delight, him fiddling with my nerves and trying to make me respond. To jump in any direction, as long as he could just get a reaction, any reaction, from me.
It’s not the scar it’s something else the scar’s gone ohGod the scar’s gone where—
The hole in my memory gaped, yawning…and I fell in with the hot breath of the beast on my face. The Hill screamed like a woman in labor, and time…stopped.
The Sorrow rose. She cast a glance back over her shoulder, her face slack and terribly graven. Bruises crawled over her skin, the shadows of Chadean sorcery doing what they could to ameliorate the damage. But she was in bad shape, bleeding all over, her tangled hair smoking at each knot.
Each inch of silver on me ran with blue flame. My head was full of screaming noise.
“Kill,” Perry hissed, from where I’d kicked him. “Kill it now!”
I lifted my gun, slowly. It was a terrible dream, fighting through syrup, my muscles full of lead.
Belisa’s chin dipped wearily. She pitched forward just as the egg stopped spinning.
The thing that slid its malformed hand through the barrier between this world and Hell twitched. I heard myself screaming, sanity shuddering aside from the sight. They do not dress when they are at home, and when they come through and take on a semblance of flesh it’s enough to drive any ordinary person mad. Wet salt trickles slid down from my eyes, slid from my nose and ears.
They were not tears.
There was a rushing, the physical fabric of our world terribly assaulted, ripping and stretching. My screams, terrible enough to make the Hill shudder all the way down to its misery-soaked foundations. Perry, hissing in squealgroan Helletöng, and under it all, so quiet and so final, Mikhail’s voice from across a gulf of years. Long nights spent turning over everything about his death, remembering him, all folding aside and compressing into what he would say if he was here. Or maybe just the only defense my psyche had against the thing struggling to birth itself completely.
Now, Mikhail said. Kill now, milaya. Do not hesitate.
My teacher’s killer was in the way.
The scar crunched on my wrist. I squeezed the trigger. Both triggers, and I saw the booming trail of shockwaves as the bullets cut air. Belisa’s fingers had turned to claws, Chaldean spiking the soup of noise, and she tore at the not-quite-substantial flesh of the thing. Blue light crawled over her as if she wore silver, the same blue that the caretaker’s eyes had flashed. The shadows of the Chaldean parasite flinched aside, for some incomprehensible reason.
I was still screaming as the bullets tore through her and the egg as well. The collar made a zinging, popping noise, the golden runes sliding over the collar shutterclicks of racing, diseased light. Her body shook and juddered as she forced the thing behind the rip in the world back, and the physical fabric of the place humans call home snapped shut with a sound like a heavy iron door slamming. The bristling, misshapen appendage thumped down to the floor.
Belisa’s fingers, human again, plucked weakly at the collar. She was a servant of the gods who were here long before demons, the inimical forces the shadowy Lords of the Trees trapped in another place long ago. It was a Pyrrhic victory; the Imdarák didn’t survive their victory, either. And the Sorrows are always looking to bring their masters back. The ’breed? Well, they’re always looking to bring more of their kind. It’s like two different conventions fighting over the same hotel.
If anyone could have slammed a door between here and Hell shut, it was a Sorrow.
But why? And the caretaker, what was he—
My knees folded. I hit the ground. Henderson Hill whispered around me like the end of a bell’s tolling, reverberations dying in glue-thick air.
Oh, no.
Belisa folded over. I’d emptied a clip. Sorrows can heal amazingly fast, but she was probably exhausted after all the fun and games.
Her knees hit the concrete in front of the altar. Blood flowered, spattered on the floor. She shook her head, tangled hair swaying. The golden runes on the collar snuffed out, one by one.
“Ahhhhh.” It was a long satisfied sigh, escaping Perry’s bleeding lips. “Oh, yes. Yessssssssss.”
The scar drew up on my wrist and began to ache. This wasn’t the usual burning as I yanked etheric energy through it. I tore my eyes from Belisa’s slumped form and turned my right wrist up.
The print of Perry’s lips was not a scar now. It was black, as if the flesh itself was rotting, and it pulsed obscenely. As I watched the edges frayed, little blue vein-maps crawling under the surface of my flesh.
And I knew why. I could have shot around her.
But I’d chosen not to.
* * *
The dog-thing that used to be Vanner hung motionless over me. Further away, seen through vibrating, glassy air, Anya Devi extended in a leap, her long dark hair a silver-scarred banner. One of the bullets was just exiting the gun in her left hand, the explosion behind it clearly visible. Saul crouched on the grimy black-and-white squares, the fringe on his jacket unsettled, standing straight up. They were utterly, eerily still.
The hellhound itself was leaping for Anya. It was wounded, sprays of black ichor hanging behind it like fine lacework scarves.
“We have a little time,” he said.
Henderson Hill’s caretaker crouched easily next to me, stroking the sleek head of the canine thing on top of me. Same faded coveralls, with the snarl of embroidery hiding his name. His eyes were bright clean blue, no longer filmed. And the shadow of scarring on his face was clearing up nicely. Alone of all the things at the Hill, he’d always just looked solid.
Normal.
Well, this sort of shot the idea of normal in the head, didn’t it? He wasn’t any species of nightsider I’d ever come across. He was something else. I’d been wanting to talk to him, and I’d thought I might find him here. Or even just a clue to where he was likely to be hiding once he dropped a quarter in me, pulled my arm, and set me spinning.
He’d brought Belisa to the operating room and turned her loose on the hellbreed in there. He’d also bought me breakfast right after I clawed my way out of my own grave. He’d given me my gun and my ring.
Which made him a question mark, at best.
I blinked. What the fuck? My fingers cramped on the whip, I kept the tension up. Everything stayed still, the movie of life paused and nobody thinking to warn me about it. So I wet my lips and wished I hadn’t, something foul was spread on my face. “What. The fuck.”
He grinned, a boyish expression, while he scratched behind the dog-thing’s ears with his expressive, callused hand. The shadow of sorrow in those blue eyes didn’t lighten. “Do you know how liberating it is to actually speak? Don’t worry,” he added in a rush. “I mean you no harm.”
Oh, I’m not so sure about that. “Get this thing off me.” A harsh croak, something stuck in my throat.
“Can’t. I can only break the laws of the physical so far. Little Judy, listen to me.”
I went stiff. Resisting. My jaw creaked when I finally loosened it enough. “Don’t. Call me. That.” That’s a dead girl’s name, and I’ve had enough of people saying it to me.
“Very well. Kismet, then. You named yourself for Fate, didn’t you. As a holy avenger. Much the way your predecessor Jack Karma did. You’re rather amazingly alike; all of you choose those like yourselves. It’s…” He shrugged slightly. His tan workman’s boots made a small sound as he shifted, their rubber soles grinding on dust and dirt. “It hurts to see, sometimes.”
“What the fuck are you?” I breathed. Because the gem was making a low, satisfied note, and the flood of etheric energy up my arm had turned warm and caramel-soft.
Well, that answered that question, didn’t it.
“Call me Mike.
I’d shake your hand, but you’re busy. Kismet, Hyperion must be stopped.”
Hyperion?
My brain did another one of those sideways jags. Perry. That’s what other hellbreed call him. Galina calls him Pericles, because he’s old. Mikhail just called him “that motherfucker at the Monde.” My breath jagged in, with a ratcheting sound. “No kidding.”
“You don’t understand. Everything has been according to his plan. Everything. Except your final act—the little break in the pattern. Do you remember what you did?”
My head ached, fiercely. The buzzing came back, rising inside me on a black tide. “No.” I struggled, achieved exactly nothing. I was nailed in place. I could breathe, and my heart was a live wire jumping and sizzling inside my chest. I could even tighten up on the creaking leather of the whip.
But I couldn’t move.
“You sacrificed yourself, Kismet. For the sake of many.” He was grave now, a blush of color high up on his cheekbones. Before, he’d been horrifically scarred, the gray film over his eyes somehow making him gentler. This man looked like the caretaker’s handsome older brother, his hair lifting and curling, taking on a richer gold. “That makes…certain things…possible.”
Now it was a laugh, tearing free of my resisting chest. “What things? What the hell?”
He leaned down even further. Those eyes were pitiless, terrible. They were not burning with a hellbreed’s fire. No, they were simply sad. A sadness like a knife to the heart, numb grief when the night rises and the bottle is empty and the voice of every failure and weakness starts to rumble in the bottom of your brain like a bad earthquake.
Cops get that look after a while, sometimes in stages, sometimes all at once. Other hunters, too. Sometimes, looking in the mirror while I smeared eyeliner on, I’ve caught glimpses of it.
It’s the look of seeing too much. Of being unable to turn away.
“Go to Hyperion. Do what is necessary to convince him you’re intrigued. Pretend your friends have thrown you out, whatever you like. But go. I am asking you to play Judas to a hellbreed, so that when he laughs in the moment of his triumph you can strike him down. You can be our avenging hand.”