“Well.” A dusty bottle appeared out of nowhere. Its cork popped deftly free with a wrenching, violated sound, and the fizzing, pale-amber fluid poured in a couth stream into the flutes. “Hardly dinner conversation, Kiss. But I suppose you have a right to know.” He set the bottle down with a click and picked up both glasses, cocking his head as he stared at me. His tongue flicked again, a blot of cherry-red, shocking against the paleness. “When I saw you last, you were dead.”
“When was that?” She shifted slightly, the woman suddenly using my body, and cursed us both for putting us right in the most vulnerable location in the whole damn room.
“Oh, about two months ago.” His teeth flashed, lips parting. “What would you like for dinner, my dear?”
I shifted again, uneasily. I was starving, but that other woman was warning me not to take a single sip or bite of anything he’d give me.
Where had she been when Martin Pores was feeding me?
“Knives.” I swallowed hard. “You said knives. And…a coat.”
“Don’t be uncivilized. Sit over here.” Faintly annoyed now, a shadow between those feathered eyebrows. The rippling under his skin had quieted, but the indigo threading through the whites of his eyes warned me.
My legs tensed. They carried me upright, and the gun dropped to my side. His teeth looked a lot sharper now.
So did the rest of him. A shadow of bladed handsomeness passed over his face, his eyes burning.
One step, two, my sneakers making little dry sounds against the carpet. Everything up here was new, freshly unwrapped. Like the whole stage had just been waiting for me to step onto it, under a brilliant skull-white spotlight.
“Right here.” He indicated the chair. “That’s a good girl. We’ll have a nice, happy dinner. The first of many.”
Does that mean I’ve never eaten here before? I think that’s a fair guess. And I’ll bet I had my reasons. The time for me to make any move was narrowing, ticking away in microseconds. The gun twitched, my pulse thudding along even and sonorous like a deep underground river, my right wrist suddenly burning. The buzzing had moved out into my fingertips, and it fought to bring the gun up, squeeze off a shot and let—
Footsteps. High and hard. The door burst open, and I whirled, gun trained on the new arrival.
8
Perry was suddenly there, slim pale fingers tensing and crackling at the man’s throat. Man, or boy, he was so slight I couldn’t tell. His ears came up to high points and his teeth were only bluntly human, but dapples of shadow-bruising ran over his skin, and his hair writhed in fat brown dreadlocks like it had a mind of its own.
He choked, and Perry hissed. The sound was freight trains rubbing together at midnight in a cold deserted yard, overstressed metal squealing in pain.
Helletöng, I realized. The language of the damned.
Which gave me all sorts of interesting ideas about the position I was in. The hiss-roar died away, and the Trader’s face turned an unpleasant purplish.
“I thought I said I wasn’t to be disturbed.” Perry cocked his head, each word quiet and level. “This had better be—”
“—caught—” The Trader choked again, and Perry eased up.
“What?” More ’töng, plucking at the strings below the surface of the world. I could glimpse the spreading stain, corruption welling up and torquing reality one way or another, my blue eye suddenly hot and dry. “Speak up,” Perry snarled.
He probably could, if you weren’t holding him a foot off the floor and cutting off his air. But I kept that thought to myself. It would probably be unhelpful in this situation.
It was looking like I was going to need all the help I could get. Lights were turning on inside my head, flickering in rapid fire, and the things they showed weren’t very nice at all.
“Caught one,” the Trader wheezed as the fingers in his throat loosened slightly. “We caught one. Watching us.”
“Indeed.” Perry went still for a few seconds. A hot, dry draft reeking of spoiled honey brushed the room. Even immobile, you could see his molecules trying to escape, jittering away. Under his suit coat his back shifted, something straining inside the shape he wore. Horror crawled up into my throat, my brain shivering away from the suggestion underneath. Like a twisted alien body under a blanket, so horribly wrong a chill walks up your spine with ice-glass feet.
I’ve seen that before, though. I survived seeing it. I know I did.
Perry glanced to the side, his profile severe and handsome, a classical statue’s long nose and relaxed mouth. His eyes scorched, and he made a sudden swift movement. A greenstick crack echoed, the Trader’s feet flailed, and the hellbreed dropped him like a dirty rag.
Bile whipped the back of my throat. My face stayed frozen, numb. Keep your pulse down. Training clamped down on my hindbrain; I could actually feel the pressure sinking in, hormonal balance mercilessly controlled, heartbeat and respiration struggling to escape those iron fingers.
Mikhail was always on me to keep my pulse down. I stared at the body as it slumped to the side, twitching and juddering, dusky corruption racing through its tissues. The naked, hairless chest, the ribs flared oddly to support different musculature, legs in a pair of fluttering black pants caked with something filthy and iron-smelling at the bottom. The stink of death-loosened sphincters ballooned out, exploding across the sterile unsmell, and I shivered.
Then I stilled, hoping that hadn’t been a mistake.
“There’s no need to fear.” Was he trying to sound soothing? Perry rolled his shoulders back in their sockets, cartilage crunching. “This will only take a moment, darling mine. You can even watch.”
He stood there, staring to the side, the indigo threads in the whites of his eyes swelling and retreating obscenely. As if expecting a reply.
I searched for something to say. Finally, I cleared my throat again. “Is that what’s called killing the messenger?”
He actually laughed, and the horrible thing wasn’t how loud it was. No, it was the sheer gleeful hatred, his lips smacking like I’d just told the world’s funniest joke. The laugh cut off in midstream as more swelling crackles slid around under his pale, perfect skin.
“You could say that.” He stepped daintily aside as the corpse’s legs jerked. “But it’s also a lesson. They shouldn’t interrupt me, not while I’m with you.” A sidelong glance, sipping at my face. “Come along. This should be…instructive.”
What else could I do? I followed.
* * *
Down on the ground floor, twenty seconds spent passing from one iron door to another along the edge of the vast belly of the Monde. The damned paid no attention, writhing against each other while the disco ball spun slightly faster and the music took on a screaming, spiked edge. I glanced out over their sea of chains and leather and slim legs, sweet curves and the bloom of powdery rot on each of them, and something else lit up inside my head.
Hunter, Jill. You’re a hunter. And these are what you kill.
Which opened up huge new vistas of contemplation I had no luxury to indulge in, because this second door gave onto a hall lit by low bloody neon tangles, crawling like worms against the wood-paneled walls, and my fingers tightened on the gun again. More doors marched down the hallway on either side, and again recognition rose to choke me. Little half-remembered scenes played out inside my skull, the woman who shared my body unlocking mental doors and throwing them open—just like Perry, his hair and clothes now dyed scarlet, chose a door on the left and flung it wide.
“Well, well, well,” he chanted, mincing into the room beyond. “What have we here? Oh, look. A stray cat.”
A cold spear went through me. Cat?
The last time I’d been here, these doors had all been standing open, torn-out teeth in a dead smile. Behind the one at the far end of the hall had been a table shattered to matchsticks, an iron throne demolished, and something hanging in silvery chains. Something horribly battered, and as I’d walked in the chains had rasped against each other, f
at, dry-sliding tongues.
I stared down the hall. If I walked to the end, would I find a room where the table was put back together as if it had never been broken, mirror-polished and solid? And the throne at the end…would its metal spikes be repaired? Or would a new one have been brought in?
A low, terrible growl cut across the hallway. It was a cleaner sound than ’töng, and it turned another key inside the broken lock my head had become.
—pair of dark eyes, tawny sides moving, the sun picking out gold along a cat’s sleek lines, and he nuzzled my throat, kissing while I shook. The crisis tore through me again, and the kiss turned to a bite, pressure applied with infinite care, the skin bruising as he sucked. The neck’s erogenous in the extreme for a cat Were, and Saul—
Saul? I jolted back into myself. My lips shaped the word, but I said nothing.
He was important. My pulse sped a fraction, control clamped down, and I began to get a very bad feeling about all this.
“Hold it down. She’ll want to see this.” A low, delighted laugh, and the wasp-buzz was a dark curtain inside my head, bulging over some horrible, unknowable shape. “Oh, this couldn’t have been better if we’d planned it. Kiss?” Calling me, like a dog. “Kiss, my darling, come inside.”
I hated him calling me that. Another key, another broken lock, muscles hardening as I twisted it. The effort was both physical and mental, the gem on my wrist scorching, threads of silvery pain sliding up the nerve channels all the way to my elbow.
This time, the buzzing was a curtain of shining metallic insect bodies, and the gem on my wrist vibrated as the curtain pulled aside. Dawn rose inside my head, but it was the sterile white light of a nuclear sunrise, everything inside me turning over and shattering as consciousness flooded me.
Jill. Jill Kismet. Hunter.
The memories slammed through me all at once, my entire body locking down, muscles spasming and ruthlessly controlled. Fighting in the dark, night after night spent cleansing the city streets of things like the dancing mob in the belly of this building—and Perry, pulling the strings, our bargain sealed by a scarred lip-print on my right wrist.
I hated everything about him. Everything. But that wasn’t important right now. Training jacked my hormone balance, adrenaline a bright copper flood across my tongue, the bloody neon light flashing as my eyelashes fluttered. The ring was a scorch on my left hand, silver reacting to the etheric contamination filling this bruised, hollow place. I dropped back into myself with a thud, and heard Perry laugh again. A low, very satisfied chuckle, a razor against numb flesh. There was a wet sound, and the growl cut short as if a door had slammed in the middle of it.
I knew that sound. It was a Were. Probably a cat Were, too. He’d just been punched in the gut.
If there was a Were here at the Monde, he was looking at a whole lot of hurt. And if it was who I thought it was…
…I couldn’t let that happen.
9
Immobility shattered. My eyes flicked open. I drew in a deep breath spiced with hellbreed corruption, the copper stink of blood, and a sudden colorless fume of rage.
I moved.
The door slammed open, hitting a wide-load Trader—chunky-thick, plaid shirt, bare feet misshapen and horned with calluses—with a sound like an axe sinking into good, dry cordwood. I twisted in midair, gun roaring, and the second Trader—slim, dark, head exploding in a mess of bone and brain—folded down. A head shot, and a good one, but how I was going to deal with Perry was a whole ’nother ball of wax. I landed, whirling as Perry made a sound like a frozen mountainside calving, chunks of overstressed icy stone groaning and tearing free.
The room was small, a brass drain hole glinting in the middle of the shallow-sloped concrete floor. Soaked in the neon glow, my foot flicked out, catching the third Trader—blonde, female, modded out with claws and blood-glowing compound eyes—just under the chin with a jolt and a sound of bone breaking, like glass hammers shattering in a burlap bag. Should really have boots for this sort of work. The thought was there and gone in a flash, because I dropped, instinct taking over as a pale smear bulleted past me. It was Perry, snarling, his hands outstretched, and if I hadn’t shed momentum and hit the ground he would’ve crashed right into me. As it was, he hit the wall with a crack that might’ve been funny if he hadn’t still been making that huge rock-crushing noise.
The man they’d been holding up slumped, his body heading shapelessly for the floor. I grabbed him and flung us both backward toward the door as Perry slid down the wall. Spiderweb cracks radiated out from the crater he’d put in the dark-smeared wood paneling, and a pair of chains hanging on the opposite wall jangled musically, little spots of white gleaming on their thin surfaces.
Orichalc-tainted titanium chains. I had no time to think about what they would do to whatever they would chain down in here.
Time to go to work, Jillybean.
The glass tangles lighting the room swayed, shadows dipping crazily. My sneakers slipped, and I felt, of all things, a brief burst of silver-sharp irritation. Would never happen in boots, why couldn’t they bury me with my boots on? The gem on my right wrist turned scorching, a tide of wine-red strength flooding up the bones and veins, jolting in my shoulder and roaring through the rest of me.
I was hoping it wasn’t Perry’s force I was drawing off. Whose else could it be? It didn’t matter. Deal with the devil and dance another day.
Nice to know some things hadn’t changed.
Neon tubing smashed with a tinkle as I ran right into the wall across the hall, the man’s bulk surprisingly heavy. I had one hand wrapped in his skein of dark hair, the other tangled in the shredded remains of his T-shirt, and he was bleeding. The blood was red, no trace of black at its fringes, and I hauled him up. My back burned, glass slivers digging in, and warmth trickled down from broken skin.
His head tipped back, a lean dark face horribly bruised and swelling, and a heatless shock of recognition went through me.
Wait. Not Saul. “Theron!” I yelled, and pitched aside. We went down in a heap, rolling, and another part of my aching head lit up under klieg-light memory. Theron. Werepanther. Works at Mickey’s out on Mayfair. Good backup. “Get up! Let’s move!”
Which brought up a problem: I had no weapons except the gun, not even any silver-coated ammo, and another consideration surfaced, one I had no time to indulge because a massive sound rose from the room we’d just vacated.
Perry was not going to be happy. Just guess how I knew that.
What would’ve happened if I’d eaten something? A chill walked down my bloody back, but Theron was up. He shook his head, stared up at me like he didn’t quite credit what he was seeing.
“Move!” I yelled, and shoved him toward the end of the hall that gave out into the Monde’s interior. No exit the other way, and legions of the damned between us and the outside.
Fun times, Jill! Never a boring moment! Get your ass moving!
Theron took off, a graceful unerring lope much faster than I thought he’d be able to move. I skip-shuffled back just as the Trader I’d hit with the door was propelled out into the hall, wide shoulders slumped and his face a mask of black-tinged blood from his mashed nose. Somehow it had splattered everywhere, and a fresh gout stained his flapping Hawaiian shirt as he saw me and snarled, hunching like a demonic football player. His modified feet twisted so the toes splayed and great horny toenail-claws dug into the flooring.
Don’t worry about him. Worry about Perry, who’s due out any sec—
The doorway evaporated. A wash of crackling-blue hellfire burst out, unholy flames blooming with a hiss I could hear even over the pounding throb of music through the walls. The glare swallowed the crouching Trader whole, and he went up like a fatty candle.
I drove backward, legs pumping, hoping I wouldn’t tangle with the Were as we both flung ourselves for the door that would lead out into the Monde. Trigger-finger cramping, lungs burning, had to remember to breathe, steps jolting up through my hips and sh
oulders as my sneaker-clad feet stamped hard, I threw myself back just as Perry rounded the corner, wreathed in pale-blue livid hellfire and his bland face suddenly sharply starving-handsome again.
I didn’t hit the door because Theron had, busting it clear off its hinges with a short bark of effort, a cat’s coughing cry. So I sailed back, crashing into a knot of dance-writhing Traders, scrabbling to get up get up get UP just as the flames belled out again, little tiny fingers sinking into the wall on either side of the hole. Perry was suddenly there, filling up the space.
And he looked pissed.
10
I was up again in a hot second, my heel grinding into something soft and my elbow whapping a female Trader a good one in the face. The music was still going, and I hoped like hell Theron had already made it past the bar. He’d have only the Traders at the door to worry about then, and he could be out in the night in a moment, vanished with a Were’s speed and agility.
What was he doing here in the first place? What’s going on?
That wasn’t my problem right now. My problem was the hellbreed who stepped mincingly out of the blurring, grasping fingers of blue flame and twitched his shoulders, the air peaking in high points of disturbance behind and above him. His eyes were the same color as the hellfire, indigo spreading around the edges of the burning irises and threading down over his cheeks in a veinmap tattoo. Everything turned over inside me. I remembered something else—yellow flame dripping from my hand as I pulled on the mark on my right wrist, etheric force jolting up my shoulder, sick fury and rage twining together to fuel the fire as I burned the whole hellish mess to the ground—
I gained my balance with a huge lunging effort, raising the gun. Keep moving. More skip-shuffling back, covering ground as fast as physics would let me, the noise was massive and confusion just starting to spread out in ripples.