Heaven's Spite

8

The Badger called in paramedics, and they treated Vanner for shock in an ambulance. “We kept hearing noises,” she said quietly, watching them. “He just got more and more nervous, then headed in. I had a job to do keeping the rest of them here.”

“You did fine.” I hung up, handed her cell phone back. “Four bodies. I want a full workup on whatever’s left of them. Find out which internal organs are missing. Find out who they are—”

“Already have, at least a bit. Student nurses from Saint Simeon. Pooling their rent, it looks like. Next of kin is going to be a bitch.” She looked like she was sucking on something bitter.

Each one of them was probably a parent’s pride and joy. The funerals were all going to have to be closed-casket. “Shit.” I blew out a long breath between my teeth. “Tell Piper not to release the bodies until I give the okay.”

It wasn’t going to be pleasant for the families. But that was the way it was.

She nodded. Sullivan stood with the blues in a huddle near the gate. The sound of male bullshitting had a high sharp note it doesn’t normally have, and the blues kept glancing at me. Short little nervous glances that skittered off the edge of my consciousness.

Vanner moaned, shapelessly. I looked at the house. A cloud of etheric bruising lingered, intensifying now that I’d unleashed sorcery inside its walls and ripped apart the bodies. One of the regular exorcists was going to have to come out and clean it. Probably Wallace, since Eva was on vacation and Benito was handling part of her caseload. Avery had enough to do keeping up with the police department. “Make sure Jughead gets one of the trauma counselors. And get Wallace out here for cleanup after Forensics is through.”

She nodded, digging out one of the tiny pads of paper she was always carrying. A pen appeared, and she made notes. “Jughead, trauma. No release on bodies. Wallace out for cleanups. His number’s still good?”

“The 3309? Hasn’t changed for eight years.” But the Badger’s thoroughgoing little heart wouldn’t let her take it for granted, and I knew as much. “Have I ever told you how much I love your eye for detail?”

“Don’t let Sully hear you say that. He thinks my body’s the only thing to love me for.” A flash of a grin, but her eyes were dark and grieving. “I tell him the line starts on the left. He thinks I should make exceptions for him.”

“Does your husband know Sullivan’s desperately in love with you?” I played along. It sounds callous, but when you see lives cut short and bodies strewn in pieces, it’s either gallows humor or screaming sobs.

I prefer the humor.

The Badger’s smile did not ease. “Oh, no. Frank would kill him. Then I’d have to break in a whole new partner. And I just got this one housebroken—”

“Are you taking my name in vain again?” Sullivan called. He detached himself from the knot of blues and ambled over. He didn’t look at my chest, where the Talisman was peeping out through its burnt hole. It was glowing, a fierce reddish gleam strong enough to read by if I was in a dark room.

I should calm down. I took a deep breath. It didn’t work.

“Of course not.” The Badger gave him a sweet smile. “Just talking about your bathroom habits. Anything else, Jill?”

“Phone records.” I stared at the house, my eyebrows drawing together. “See if we can piece together their visitors, or an estimated time of death. I’ll need to know what’s missing from the bodies before I—” My mouth shut, jaw clenching for a moment before I focused again. Or what’s not missing. “Have them rape-kitted, too.”

“Jesus.” Sullivan’s lips turned down and he fished out a worn pack of Lucky Strikes.

The Badger was solemn. Jughead moaned again, but quietly. It was anyone’s guess what had scared him more—seeing the decaying corpse up and moving around, or seeing me fighting it with inhuman speed.

I checked the sky, shuffled through everything I wanted to do, and got exactly nowhere. We were wearing toward dawn faster and faster, and all I could do was wait for Hutch to pull the references, wait for the autopsy to tell me what I should be suspecting.

Thrashing around without something more definite would only waste time and resources. Still… “I’ve got to get going. Buzz me when you’ve got something.”

The Badger nodded, waving me away. Sullvan tipped me a salute. Jughead Vanner made a thin muttering noise, and the EMT in the back of the ambulance with him spoke up. “Blood pressure’s fine. You’re going to be okay, kiddo.”

I wished I was that optimistic.

Mikhail’s headstone is on the northern side of Beacon Hill’s lush green, overlooking downtown and the mountains in the distance. The whole valley sprawls out, a vista as familiar as my own face in the mirror. I’d known, as soon as I saw the Talisman in the crushed paper box, that I would eventually end up here.

No use putting it off. And besides, better here than Perry’s nightclub. If I went into the Monde like this, there was no telling what would happen.

I’d stopped at the edge of the barrio for a bottle of Stolichnaya—have I mentioned how loose the liquor laws are on the nightside?—and when I uncapped it the colorless fume could be an excuse for the prickling behind my eyes. I took a long hit and poured him a good healthy shot. It splashed on the granite stone. A faint whisper of traffic in the distance, the lamps along the periphery and at intervals failing to make any dent in the night. Darkness hugged the ground here, hung between the trees in rubbery sheets. The water they dump all over this place every day is a great psychic conductor. Grief and longing roiled under the surface of the neatly clipped grass.

I crouched easily, took another mouthful from the bottle. Swallowed, relished the brief sting. “Hi.” A thin, breathy sound. “It’s me.” As if he wouldn’t know.

Here was one place I still felt young. I knew his ashes were carefully scraped up from the pyre the Weres built him, safe in an alabaster jar in Galina’s vault. But it was here at the gravestone that I felt his presence. I didn’t think he’d be a stickler for tradition and only hang around his ashes. Or maybe it was just that I needed him here, out on a hillside with the whole city spread beneath us and the vast dark sky above. At Galina’s, someone would be trying not to listen. And what could I do, wake her up in the middle of the night every time I wanted to talk to him?

I poured him another shot. The thin sound of the liquid hitting the stone vanished into the breeze, the river inhaling as dawn approached. I let out a long breath, my shoulders slumping a bit. A red gleam touched the puddle, hot and baleful even when reflected.

“So, yeah. I guess you’ve noticed the Eye. Perry dropped it off.” It didn’t sound like much when I said it out loud. But the night tensed around me. I glanced up. All quiet, trees standing watch over the soundly sleeping dead. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Misha.”

I could almost hear him. Bad feeling every day on this job, milaya. Is part of contract.

Well, yeah, I knew that. Jeez. What would he really say to me?

It’s one of the hardest things to get used to. No matter how well you know someone, when they die you will never know exactly what they’d say. Especially if you loved them.

Especially if you still love them, deep in that room in your heart where you keep the only things that truly matter. The baggage you take to your own personal desert island, the exile called life all of us are born into.

The Church holds it as a point of doctrine that hunters don’t go to Heaven. Mikhail had been nominally Eastern Orthodox, with a few significant exceptions. I go to Valhalla, he had told me more than once. Where the fight is the play, like movie.

I’d only asked him once why someone from his part of the world would pick a Viking afterlife. Because, was his answer. Now stop the asking stupid question, milaya, and do your kata.

I found my free fingers were touching the Talisman’s sharp-scratching edges. The gem thrummed, the carved ruby at my throat warming as well. The Eye purred like a kitten under my touch.

I put my hand down with an effort.

“I never got to ask you why you did it. Why you fell for that Sorrows bitch.” I swallowed the rest of the question—why you didn’t stay with me. Why I wasn’t enough. Yet another thing I would never know.

The scar puckered and twitched, tasting the misery in the air. I hadn’t bothered to cover it again. “I guess it doesn’t matter.” The words were ashes. “Not like any answer’s gonna bring you back. But still.”

A rustle of movement. I was up, the bottle hitting the ground and my right-hand gun free, before the shape resolved out of the darkness and I recognized him. I reholstered the gun and waited while he came up the hill. It was a courtesy to make noise while approaching.

When his deeper shadow finally detached itself from the rest of the night, I pitched the words to carry. “I thought you were going to wait for me at home.”

Saul tilted his head slightly. Glitter of eyes, the silver in his hair glinting. “It smelled bad. And I knew you’d come up here.” He avoided the headstone with respectful ease, striding around to the right, and stopped a couple feet away from me.

“Sorry.” I could have been apologizing for both things. “I, uh. Well. It got messy in there. I busted Perry up a bit.” I was suddenly aware of the rags of my T-shirt, rips in my leather pants, the reek of rotting corpse, the ick stiffening in my hair and the mess I’d left behind me just about everywhere tonight. Some days are like that. You just break everything as soon as you drag yourself up out of bed.

My trench coat fluttered. The wind was rising, and it was cold.

He bent and scooped up the bottle. It had landed on its bottom, fortunately. “What else did Perry say?”

“He hinted that a big-time ’breed was looking to come through.” Again, I added silently. Since I only narrowly slammed the door on him the last time. It wasn’t technically a lie, but the less Saul knew about that case the better. He worried enough as it was. “A ’breed with a big reason to hate any hunter of Jack Karma’s lineage.”

“Oh.” He touched the bottle’s open mouth to his lips, then handed it to me. A graceful gesture, like all Were movements. Polite, tactful, expressing everything. “Which is why you’re going to invent some reason to ask me to stay at Galina’s.”

My face froze into a mask. I didn’t think I was that obvious.

But who else knew me the way he did? “It crossed my mind,” I admitted. Then, because it was dark and we were at my teacher’s grave, because the Talisman throbbed like a sore tooth on my chest and I ached all over, especially with the heavy weight of the bezoar in my pocket, I told him the truth. “It would kill me to lose you, Saul.”

He turned his head. Clean, beautiful profile presented as he looked down at the city. “I’ve done all right so far.”

Damn touchy Weres. But at least he wasn’t assuming I didn’t need him around and clamming up. That was no good. “I’m not implying you can’t take care of yourself. I just… Jesus, Saul. Please.”

“Look.” He pointed, a swift gesture taking in the lights huddled in the valley, cuddled against the blackness of the river’s flow and the bulk of the looming mountains. The stars were hard, cold diamonds scattered over dirty velvet. “That’s Santa Luz.”

I know that. I lifted the bottle to my mouth, waited for him to make his point.

He waited a beat, as if he’d expected me to say something, then went on. “Every single innocent soul down in that valley is pulling on you from one direction. And I’m pulling from the other. How long is it going to be before we tear you in half?”

Is that what you think? That you’re on different sides? The vodka burned my mouth. I swallowed. Dried blood crackled on my skin. “You’re wrong. You both pull me in the same direction, Saul. The only thing pulling on the other side is… this. The things I’m trained to do. I commit murder every night. Several times, if everything’s hopping and the ’breed are uppity.” It was a night for uncomfortable truths. I would have expected us to be halfway to a screaming match by now. “Sometimes I wonder what makes me different from them.” It was my turn to wait before giving him the answer. “Then I realize it’s you.”

“Jill—”

I wanted to get it all out. “I’m scared, Saul. I can’t retire. This is the only thing I know how to do. The only thing I’m capable of. And if something happens to you, I am going to end up worse than the hellspawn. Because I won’t care.”

Silence, then, between us. I lifted the bottle, let a thin stream dip from it and plash on the headstone. None of us would get drunk—my helltainted metabolism ran too fast, and Weres burn through alcohol like it’s sugar.

And Mikhail? He wasn’t even here. It was just a stone I poured hooch on to make myself feel better.

Most of the time I was glad he was sleeping soundly. Because if he wasn’t I would have to make him. Then there were the other times, when I almost didn’t care.

I wanted him back.

Saul was very still, the charms in his hair glinting. “I wouldn’t take the Long Road without you, Jill.” Quietly, stubbornly. “Not even you could make me do that.”

Sometimes talking to him felt like a cardiac arrest, like my heart was literally stopping. Or just hurting. What do you do when you love someone so much your body does that? You can’t fight it, you can’t shoot it, you can’t do anything but let it happen. “I don’t want to push my luck.”

He stepped close. Paused. Stepped closer. His arm came over my shoulders, and the tension went out of me. I leaned into him, filth and dried blood making small crinkling sounds as my head dropped down. Silver chimed as charms hit each other, and I saw the red glow of the Talisman on my chest had muted to a glimmer. It faded as I leaned into him.

He let out a soft sigh. “It’s not luck. I chose this, and so did you. We made a decision. Even if you let go, kitten, I’m still holding on.”

A hot bubble rose up in my chest. It was a scream. I had to work to keep it locked down, swallowing several times. “Saul?” Again, the high, breathless voice. I sounded fifteen again. And scared.

“Shhh. Listen.”

I did. Heard nothing but the breeze in the trees, whispering over the well-watered grass. Traffic in the distance. My heartbeat, a song in my ears. Silver clinking a little as Saul moved, lifting his chin.

“I’ll go to Galina’s.” Quietly. His arm tightened around me.

Oh, thank God. “Thank—”

“Someone has to look after Gilberto. You’ve sent Hutch there too, I presume?”

I nodded. He could feel the movement against his shoulder. I reeked. He smelled of healthy cat Were, the dry-oily, slightly spicy tang of a brunet male. “Saul—”

“Don’t thank me, Jill. I’m doing this for your peace of mind. I’ll stay there for a day or so, but then I’m back on the job with you. It’s a compromise.”

Compromise, consensus, cooperation. It’s how Weres work. It’s also goddamn annoying. “You mean you’re just staying there long enough for it to get dangerous.”

“You see? A compromise.” He even, damn him, sounded amused. “So Perry’s hinting about a hellbreed coming through. What makes you believe him?”

“Besides the fact that he brought me a present?” I sounded as snide as Gilberto. “Nothing. He wants something, I’m going to hang back and make him work until I figure out exactly what’s going on.” The bezoar twitched in my pocket—another task to finish, before dawn if I could. “Then I’ll start shooting. This may be the game that ends up with me killing him.”

“Can’t happen too soon,” Saul murmured, and we were in wholehearted agreement on that score. “What are you doing tonight? Or this morning?”

The thing I wished I could say—having some quality time with my favorite Were—was tempting. It stuck in my throat like the lie it was, because I knew I was going to jump the gun and go hunting. “Tracking down a hellbreed who killed four student nurses over in Cruzada. When I’m done I’ll come by Galina’s. You can make me breakfast.”

“And Hutch. And Gilberto. And Galina. We’ll be a happy merry crowd.” His arm squeezed gently, half a hug. “Come soon, huh? I know, I know. As soon as you can.”

Another nod. “If I don’t track this ’breed down by dawn I’ll come by for breakfast. Promise.”

“Good.” He let go of me and stepped away. The wind touched where he used to be down the side of my body. A hunter doesn’t care about external temperatures, but I felt abruptly cold.

But he cupped my chin in his hand. Warm skin, a Were’s metabolism radiating heat. I leaned forward, he bent down, and our mouths met.

It should have been uncomfortable, kissing in front of Mikhail’s gravestone. I had the oddest sense that Misha wouldn’t mind. And then there was the hot, nasty feeling squirming under my breastbone for just a moment—look, here’s someone who wants me. Someone who hasn’t run off with a Sorrow and ended up dead in a filthy hotel room.

It wasn’t fair. I didn’t know why Mikhail had done… what he’d done. I just wanted him back. And the sex, I understood now, had just been another way to tie us together. High pressure and availability instead of… what I had here and now in front of me, his fingers on my face and his purr thrumming through me, loosening my bones.

I didn’t want to let him go, my dirty fingers twining in his growing-out hair. But we both had to breathe more deeply after a bit, so we stood, foreheads together, my eyes closed. His purr, a Were’s response to a mate’s distress, settled into a subliminal pressure. Minutes ticked by.

It was no use. I had work to do. Even if I knew I was going out looking for a fight when I should be waiting for Hutch or Forensics to get back to me.

The vision of the last corpse’s face, screaming silently and forever under the glare of the dining-room light fixture, printed itself inside my eyelids. I didn’t flinch, but I did make a small sound. Immediately clamped my lips together.

I am about to do something stupid.

He let go of me, one finger at a time. Kissed my forehead, a gentle pressure of lips. Then he was gone, boots just touching the fresh, juicy grass. I listened as long as I could to the sound of his footsteps, light and graceful-quick. They shifted as he blurred into muscled, four-footed cougar form, still running faster than anything normal could.

Super-acute hellbreed-jacked hearing was good for something.

I found I was still clutching the bottle of Stoli. It made a thin musical sound as I upended it, washing Mikhail’s headstone. Alcohol fume wafted up, whisked away on a brisk breeze. The river’s inhale sped up as dawn approached. If I was going to find—and serve bloody, screaming vengeance on—the ’breed who had killed those girls, now was the time.

I won’t lie. I wanted to kill something else tonight. And it scared me even as I turned on my heel and vanished into the darkness.