I wondered, not for the last time, why the mark hadn't faded with Japh's death. Of course, Lucifer had first burned it into my skin.
That was an uncomfortable thought, to say the least.
Jace was nowhere in sight when I took the lifts down and emerged blinking again into the gray day. Down on the street the drizzle had turned to puddles vibrating with hoverwash and splashing up whenever an airbike or wheel-bike went by, the ground hovertraffic moving a little bit slower than usual. The sidewalks were crowded with people, most of them normals intent on their own business, since the psions would probably be home in bed. It felt good to walk, my hands dangling loose by my sides and my braid bumping my back, my boots light on cracked pavement Bulgarov had been left in a holding cell in Jersey lock-down; the fee for the collar plus the extra 15 percent I'd told Trina to charge was probably safely in Jace's bank account by now. I didn't need the money, as there was plenty left from Lucifer's payoff. Even though I had no qualm about using it, I still flinched internally whenever I looked at my statements or signed on through my computer deck. Blood money, a payment for the life Lucifer had manipulated and cajoled me into taking, even though left to myself I would have killed Santino.
I had needed revenge. Lucifer still owed me, both for Doreen's daughter and for Japhrimel. I didn't have a chance of collecting, but still. He owed me, and I owed my life to a dead demon.
I winced, pacing through the rainy gray Saint City morning. The Prince of Hell might still be keeping an eye on me.
I owed him nothing, and that was exactly what the Prince of Hell was going to get from me. End of story.
Think about something else, Dante. You've got a lot to brood over. Like Jace.
Jace had given up his Mob Family for me, just handed it over to his second-in-command without a word and signed the papers for cessation-of-ownership. After fighting so hard to get his own Family he'd turned his back on it and showed up at my door.
Dante, you are spectacularly good at thinking things you don't want to.
It took me an hour to get to the corner of Seventh and Cherry. I had stopped at a street vendor's for a bouquet of yellow daisies, and I stood on the south corner under the awning of a grocery store that had been put in two years ago. The times I'd been here with Lewis, there had been a used bookstore across the way.
My pulse beat thinly in my temples and throat, as if I was taking down a bounty again. I clutched the daisies in their plasticine wrap, their cheerful yellow heads with black centers nodding as I held mem in my trembling right hand. Coming back here every year was a penance, maybe, but who else would remember him? Lewis had no family, substituting the psionic kids he fostered for a real blood link. And to me, he was the only family I'd known, my caseworker from the time I was an infant until I was thirteen.
If I was anything to be proud of, it was because Lewis had taught me how to be.
Memory rose. That's the curse of being a psion, I suppose. The Magi techniques for training the memory are necessary and ruthless. A Magi-trained memory can remember every detail of a scene, a magick circle, a canon of runes, a page of text. Necessary when one is performing Greater Works of magick, where everything has to be done right the first time, but merciless when things happen that you want to forget.
The prickling in my shoulder had gone down, thankfully. There wasn't much of a crowd here, most passersby ducked into the small grocery and came out carrying a plasbag full of alcohol bottles or synth-hash cigarettes. I stood just around the corner, tucked out of the way close to the wall, and stilled myself, forcing the memories to come clear and clean.
He'd brought me down to the bookstore, a special treat, and the smooth metal of the collar against my throat was less heavy on that unseasonably sunny autumn day. The crisp cinnamon smell of dried leaves hung in the air and the sky was impossibly deep blue, the type of blue that only comes in autumn. Blue enough to make the eyes ache, blue enough to drown in. Lewis had pushed his spectacles up on his beaky nose, and we walked together. I didn't hold his hand like I did when I was a little girl, having grown self-conscious in the last few years. I had ached to tell him something, anything, about how bad things were at school, but I couldn't find the nerve.
And so we walked, and Lewis drew me out, asking me about the last books I'd read, the copy of Cicero he'd loaned me and the Aurelius he was saving for if I did well on my Theory of Magick final coming up at the end of the term. And did you enjoy the Ovid? he asked, almost bouncing with glee inside his red T-shirt and jeans. He didn't dress like a social worker, and that was one more thing to love about him. He had given me my name, my love of books, and my twelve-year-old self had cherished wild fantasies of finding out that Lew really was my father and was just waiting for the right time to tell me.
I enjoyed it, I told him, but the man was obsessed with women.
Most men are. Lewis found the oddest things funny, and it was only once I reached adulthood that I understood the jokes. When I was young, of course, I had laughed with him, just happy that he was happy with me, feeling the warm bath of his approval.
I had been about to reply when the man blundered around the corner, jittering and wide-eyed, stinking of Clormen-13. It was a Chillfreak desperate for his next dose, his eyes fastening on the antique chronograph Lewis wore, a glittering thing above his datband and looking pawnable. Confusion and chaos, and a knife. Lewis yelled for me to run, my feet rooted to the ground as the Chill-freak's knife glittered, throwing back a hot dart of sunlight that hurt my eyes. Run, Danny! Run!
My eyes were hot and grainy. Drizzle had soaked into my hair and coat. I was standing exactly where I'd stood before I'd obeyed him, turning and running, screaming while the Chillfreak descended on Lewis.
The cops had caught the freak, of course, but the chronograph was gone and the man's brain so eaten by Chill he could barely remember his own name, let alone what he'd done with the piece of antique trash. And Lew, with his books and his love and his gentleness, had left me for Death's dry country, that land where I was still a stranger even if I'd known my way to its borders.
I laid the flowers down on the wet sidewalk, as I did every year, their plaswrap crinkling. The bloodstone ring on my third left finger flashed wetly, a random dart of Power splashing from its opaque surface. "Hey," I whispered. "Hi."
He had a grave marker, of course, out in the endlessly-green fields of Mounthope. But that was too far for a student to ride public transport and get back to the school by curfew, so I ended up coming here, downtown, where he had died almost immediately. If I'd been older, combat-trained and a full Necromance, I could have run off the Chillfreak or mended Lewis's violated body, held him to life, kept him from sliding off the bridge and into the abyss, under the blue glow of Death… if Yd been older. If I'd had some presence of mind I could have distracted the Chillfreak, diverted his attention; wearing a collar meant I couldn't have used any psionic ability on him, but there were other ways. Other things I could have done.
Other things I should have done.
"I miss you," I whispered. I had only missed two Anniversaries, my first year at the Academy up north and the year Doreen died. Murdered, in fact, by a demon I hadn't known was a demon at the time. "I miss you so much."
MM desperandum! he would crow. Never fear!
Other kids were raised on fairy tales. Lew raised me on Cicero and Confucius, Milton and Cato, Epictetus and Sophocles, Shakespeare. Dumas. And for special treats, Suetonius, Blake, Gibbon, and Juvenal. These are the books that have survived, Lew would remind me, because they are as close to immortal as you can get. They're good books, Dante, true books, and they'll help you.
And oh, they had.
I came back to myself with a jolt. Morning hovertraffic whined and buzzed overhead. I heard footsteps, people passing by on Cherry to get to the shops, but nobody going down this side of Seventh because it was apartment buildings, and everyone was gone for the day, or in bed. The daisies, a bright spot of color against cracked hard pavement,
glowed under the thickening rain.
"All right," I said softly. "See you next year, I guess."
I turned slowly on my heel. The first steps, as usual, were the hardest, but I didn't look back. I had another appointment today. Jace would beat me home, and he would probably already have a few holovids from the rental shop on Trivisidero. Maybe some old Father Egyptos, we both loved that show and could quote damn near every line of dialogue. What evil creeps in the shadows? Egyptos, the bearer of the Scarab of Light, shall reveal all! Uncharacteristically, I was smiling. Again.
Chapter Two
Morning had leapt gray into drizzling afternoon when I knocked on the wooden door, the street behind me gathering circles of orange light under each streetlamp. A glowing-red neon sign in the front window—a real antique—buzzed like hovertraffic without the rattling whine, its reflection cast on the bank of yarrow below. I felt wrung-out and a little sore, as usual after a bounty, and the blood on my clothes, with its simmering stink of decaying spicy fruit, didn't help.
The door was painted red, and the shields over this small brick house with its cheerful ragged garden were tight and well-woven. Kalifor poppies vied with mugwort and feverfew, nasturtium and foxglove; there were some late bloomers, but mostly the plants were now merely green or dying back, getting ready for the rainy chill of winter. I smelled the sharpness of rosemary, she must have just harvested her sage too. In summer the garden was a riot of color, the property-line shields smooth and carefully woven, an obvious stronghold. Then again, I'd heard Sierra never left her house. I'd never seen or heard of her around town, and I didn't care either.
No, I came here for a different reason. I blinked against the gray sunlight, wished it was darker. Like most psions, I never feel quite myself during the day; a marker for nocturnalism crops up with amazing regularity in psion gene profiles. When darkness falls is when I feel most alive. At least that hadn't changed, even if everything else about me had.
I was glad I was back in time. I'd missed my appointment last month and been a little out of sorts ever since. I lifted my hand to knock at the door but the house shields had already flushed a warm, welcoming rose color, and the door pulled open. I pushed back a few stray strands of my damp hair and met Sierra Ignatius's eyes.
Her gaze was wide and pale blue, irises fading into the whites, the pupils sometimes flaring randomly. There was an odd film over her eyes; the sign of congenital blindness. Usually blindness is fixed with gene therapy during infancy, but for some reason she hadn't received the therapy then or in later years. Despite that, she moved around her little brick home with an accuracy and assurance some sighted people never achieve. Rumor had it that her parents had been Ludders, but I wasn't curious enough to find out. Her blindness made her, like me, an anomaly; it was probably why I allowed myself to come here.
"Danny!" She sounded calmly delighted, a short thin woman with thistledown hair and a thorn-laden cruciform tat on her left cheek. My cheek burned, my tat shifting. I felt another unwilling smile tug the corners of my mouth up. Sierra looked like a tiny pixie full of mischief, and her aura smelled of roses and wood ash, a clean human smell I somehow didn't mind as much as others. "I wondered if you'd come back. You missed last month."
Behind Sierra, taking her hand off the hilt of her short-sword, was a rangy female Shaman with the kind of tensile grace that shouted combat training and a tat that matched Sierra's. She inclined her chin gracefully, turned on her heel, and stamped away. Kore didn't like me, and the feeling was mutual. We'd tangled over a bounty once, one of her Skinlin friends I'd hauled in for murder and illegal genesplicing. She didn't hold a grudge but she didn't have to like me either, and whenever I showed up for my appointment, Kore took herself upstairs out of the way. I appreciated her restraint.
I would have hated to kill her.
"Sorry I missed last month." I stepped inside, took a deep lungful of kyphii incense and the smell of dried lavender. The air was still and close, and as soon as Sierra closed the outside world out I felt my shoulders relax fractionally. Her front hall was low and dim, candles burning in a niche under a statue of Aesclepius. The walls were wood paneling and the floor mellow hardwood. "I was out on a bounty."
"You've been out on a bounty since I've met you, sweetie. Come on back, the table's set up. What's hurting you today?" She was, as usual, all business, setting off past me with a confident step, faster than I could have gone with my eyes closed. I saw her aura fringing, sending out little fingers of awareness, the perfume of spiced Power trailed behind her, reminding me of Jace. We walked down the hall, through the neat little kitchen with its racks of potted herbs in the window and the suncatcher above lazily hanging on a string. Her counters were clean and the kitchen table clear except for two wine-red place-mats and a vase of white lilies that sent a shiver up my spine. There were few flowers I could see anymore without thinking of Santino.
"Hurting me?" As usual, I pretended to give the question my full attention as she led me into the round room at the back of the house, where a fountain of piled black stones dripped. She stepped down onto the plush carpet and moved into the middle of the room where the table sat, draped with fresh white sheets. Hurting me? Nothing, really. Only my shoulder. My hand. My heart. "Not much. I feel pretty okay."
"liar. All right." She smoothed the sheets, a habitual movement. "What do you want me to work on?"
I shrugged, remembered she couldn't see the motion. Slid out of my coat, hung it up on the peg by the door, and undid my rig with the clumsy fingers of my right hand. "My back, whatever else. Like usual. Just work your magic, that's all."
Sierra cocked her pale pixie head, listening as I hung my bag and my rig up. "Cordite," she noted mildly. "And I can smell that sweet stuff. You got clipped?"
I found myself smiling again. I could remember going months without smiling, before Rio. "You're amazing. Yeah, I'm a little dirty. Sorry." I leaned down, working my boots off with my right hand, then padded to the table in my sock feet. "Do you mind?"
If I had still been fully human, I would have had to chemwash to get the blood oft As it was, only my clothes were bloody; my skin had absorbed the thick black ichor. She, tike all psions, could see the staining of black-diamond fire in my aura, marking me as something close to demon; she never asked me to chemwash, figuring whatever communicable nasties I had weren't dangerous to her. It was open wounds she had to watch out for, and I didn't have any of those.
Not on the outside, anyway.
"Of course not. Your back, you said. What about that left shoulder of yours?"
I reached up with my right hand, touched my shirt over the mark. "Leave that alone for right now." It was the standard answer, and as usual, she accepted it gracefully.
I stripped down, left my clothes on the straight-backed chair set to the side, and eased myself onto the thigh-high table, squirming onto my belly while Sierra pulled the sheet up over me. I'd told her she didn't have to leave while I disrobed, most psions are pretty comfortable with nakedness. I wasn't precisely uncomfortable, but taking her up on her offer to give me privacy while I undressed seemed weak. I fitted my face into the facecradle, seeing the carpet below me in the flickering wash of candlelight and my braid swinging to the side, and let out an involuntary sigh.
"I live for that sound." She folded the sheet down low on my hips. The bolster went underneath my ankles to take the stress off my lower back, and I sighed again. "Ooh, twice. Must have been a hard month."
"Yeah. Couple of bounties." I closed my eyes as she rubbed her hands together, heating them up, the warm good smell of almond oil blooming. She didn't scent the oil, for which I was grateful.
"Always working." She laid her hands flat on my back, one right between my shoulder blades, the other at the base of my spine. A few moments of pressure, then she rocked me back and forth a little, gauging the way my body mass responded. "Too tense, Danny. When are you going to learn to loosen up?"
"Perfectly flexible," I muttered. "Got to wo
rk to pay you, sweets."
It wasn't true, I had enough money now. I had all the money I could ever want. I didn't need the bounty fees. But oh, gods, I did need the bounties.
She moved to the head of the table. Then what I'd been waiting for… she leaned in and smoothed both her hands down on either side of my spine, digging into my muscles under the tough, perfect golden skin. I let out another sigh. Her hands were cool and forgiving, my skin warmer than hers because of the hiked metabolism. I shivered with delight as she started the usual routine, kneading at me. My right hand relaxed and dangled off the table as I let go, fraction by fraction, Sierra's hands seeking out knots and nodes of tension.
Gabe had bought me my initial consultation with Sierra, and I'd thought it a frivolous gift even after she bullied and dragged me to the red-painted door at the appointed time. The first two-hour massage had ended with me in a languid puddle, more relaxed than I could ever remember. I'd gone home whistling, arrived at my door in the closest thing to a good mood I'd had since before Rio, and promptly burst into tears on my way upstairs. Thank the gods Jace had been out shopping for groceries. I'd locked myself in the bathroom and had a completely uncharacteristic fit of sobbing, then took a long hot shower. As dawn had risen through my bedroom window, I had fallen asleep for the first time in weeks, a thin restless troubled sleep but sleep nonetheless.
That did it, I was booked. I came back once a month unless I was on a bounty, and each time it was the same: her delicate iron fingers digging into me, smoothing me out. Hers was a touch I didn't have to fend off or worry about what it cost me. I paid her, she touched me, it was that simple. Even and uncomplicated.
Why couldn't everything be like that?
"Are you staying in town long?" Her voice was soft, if I chose not to talk she would be silent.
"A while. Don't know when the next bounty's coming up." I felt the involuntary quiver go through me. She must have, too, because her touch gentled.