Heaven's Spite

15

The bezoar tugged against white silk and a spider cage of silver filaments; Galina had the cage lying around and it worked like a charm. The knife, driven through the cage, held it against the passenger-side seat like a pinned butterfly. The silver in the blade sparked in waves, spume against a rocky shore.

Tires screaming, I jagged around a corner and up Fairview. Morning traffic was just getting started, and intuition tingled along my nerves. I cut the wheel sharply just as the bezoar leapt, the cage yanking against the knife, and I slapped it back down. The Pontiac was an automatic, so I didn’t have to worry about shifting. It was a good thing, too. Because the bezoar went wild, tugging and straining against the silver threads, and I had to shove the knife more firmly into the upholstery again to keep it trapped. I cut the wheel once more, tires smoking, and slewed into a turn onto 139th, the direction the bezoar was pulling.

Tracking with a physical link is so easy, it’s frightening.

Warehouses rose around me. The industrial district simmered under a flood of sunshine, day peeking wearily through the streets, trapping dust in the air. Soon the winter frost would break and we’d get a roil of spring storms and flash floods, settling into summer’s crackheat glaze.

The bezoar rattled and sprang, to the left this time. Intuition warned me, a sharp prickle along my entire body, and I stood on the brakes. The car slewed, I realized I was swearing low and steadily under my breath, and I narrowly missed T-boning a semi. It hove out of the way, I smashed the pedal to the floor again and was off. The subtle knocking in the engine got fractionally louder.

I penetrated the tangle of warehouses and shipping yards, following the bezoar’s urging. It rattled around in the cage like an angry cancer. The nearer I got to its source, the more violently it moved, fighting against the blessing on the silk and the silver’s sharp gleam.

My prey probably guessed I was tracking him. He’d be stupid not to.

I finally skidded to a stop outside a shambling warehouse on 154th and Chavez. Slid the knife free of the upholstery, the bezoar trying futilely to knock the cage into the footwell. Grabbed the little bastard, folding the cage down around it until it hummed like an angry bumblebee in my hand. It went into my pocket, where it felt like my pager trying to get my attention.

I knew this place. Years ago it had actually been a rave joint, hopping almost every night and raided sporadically by Santa Luz’s brave boys and girls in blue. Then a couple Traders got involved with slipping roofies to kids they thought wouldn’t be missed and then carting them out of town to a friendly slave ring.

It happens.

One of the rules of my town is “you don’t play in the under-18 pool.” I came down on those Traders as hard as I could, and chased the ’breed they’d Traded with, dispatching them all in a welter of blood and screaming. Then I’d eradicated every other ’breed within the city limits who was even tangentially involved.

Hellbreed function on profit and loss. I wanted to make it so expensive for them to trade in young bodies that they gave up.

I’m still working on it.

Weathered scraps of old crime-scene tape stapled to entrances and exits fluttered in the stiff morning breeze from the river. Bleached by the constant assault of sun and weather, they made little whispering sounds. The etheric bruising swirling ripe and rank over this place would have told me I’d found what I was looking for, if the bezoar hadn’t already been going mad in my pocket.

I watched it for a few moments. The need to go find Saul and bring him out of whatever they were doing to him itched unbearably under my skin, but I had to go carefully. Running in half blind wouldn’t save him. It would just get us both in more trouble.

I was now assuming whoever took him was tied to the evocation site I’d found. If Perry wasn’t involved—which I was by no means sure of—this was my next best guess. If Perry was involved, and had the masked ’breed running around doing dirty work while he pulled on other strings, this was going to get nastier before it got better.

The congestion tightened. Whoever was in there could feel me approaching. Sorcery will make a hunter’s apprentice a full-blown psychic before long—if they survive. It also has the benefit of helping a hunter pop up just where the filthy bastard isn’t looking.

Jill. You’re too distracted. You can’t go in there like this.

I told the voice of reason to take a hike. If something that could lead me to Saul was in there, that’s where I was going, dammit. It made little sense for anyone to mess with my Were. They had to know that taking him would only make me determined to knock down anything in my way to—

Maybe they do. Maybe they’re distracting you, just like they distracted you with a pile of bodies to take him. Maybe, just maybe, you should be looking somewhere else, for something else. Like Argoth.

Hutch still needed time to sort through a mound of data. He was going as fast as he could, but I was asking him to find needles in haystacks, and do it at a distance instead of at his home with access to every text the hunters in my line had accumulated.

I breathed out softly through my nose, suddenly aware I was making an odd sound. A sort of whistling moan as I breathed. How long had I been doing that? And the shaking running through me, what was that? I was too well trained not to know that it meant I was dangerously close to running on emotion instead of calculation.

The world narrowed. I shut my eyes, my smart blue eye piercing the meat of my eyelid to show me the still-contracting bruising over the warehouse in front of me. Night after night of kids dancing and hungry Traders preying made for a messy psychic “house,” and banefire wouldn’t have done much good at this point. Charged atmospheres can go either way, holy or unholy.

Guess which one is more common.

I am doing this case all wrong. I should have been focusing on the bigger priority—finding out if they were, indeed, trying to bring Argoth through. And if so, the location of every evocation site—so I could get there to disrupt them in time. Any hellbreed higher-class than a talyn is seriously bad news, and if what Hutch had said about Argoth last time was any indication, he was definitely above that classification.

It was an interesting question: how did Perry’s dark hints, Riverson’s ravings, or Belisa’s silken lies go together? Which of them to believe? Or believe none of them? If there was a deeper game being played here, I needed to get to the bottom of it.

If it was Saul’s life balanced against the lives of everyone in my city in a hellbreed game…

Something inside my chest cracked a little. I was making that whistling moan again.

I swallowed it, hard. A bitter tang coated the back of my throat. Whatever you’re going to do, Jill, get cracking. Do it now.

I set my shoulders. Drew my right-hand gun, thought about it, and kept my left hand free. I struck out for the north side of the warehouse. There was a fire escape back there that should do a little better than the front door—more cover, and kicking down the front door and yelling hadn’t done a thing at the Monde. It’s always been my favorite way to go.

But maybe it was time to change it up a bit.

Catwalks zigged back and forth inside the warehouse’s cavernous sprawl. Thin fingers of daylight touched down through the holes in the roof or gaps between the boards on the windows. The day’s heat had begun to creep into corners, gathering strength.

It smelled of dust, rat fur, metal, and the sick-sweet tang of hellbreed. A faint copper note of blood. But no healthy brunet spice of Were. Instead, the wet reek of danger and brooding, nasty sorcery, incense and perfect-tallow burning.

Those in the trade call it perfect-tallow, at least. The candles stink and make an ungodly psychic mess. That’s because they’re made from people.

Well, their bodies, anyway. How many candles would the charred bodies out by the freeway have made?

I eased along a catwalk, silence drawn over me like a cloak. Each step torturingly slow, weight spread out, toes and the ball of the foot testing before weight shifted in increments. I couldn’t be sure if my heavier muscle and bone would break the rickety grating or wring a betraying groan out of the struts. My eyes roved. The shadows were too thick, sorcery lurking in their depths. The entire place breathed, dust moving oddly and the light behaving like it shouldn’t, bouncing off odd corners and falling into deep black wells without a gleam or a sigh.

Another tangle of metal stretched over what had been the dance floor, a wide expanse of cracked concrete. The kids had brought in plywood, scraps of scavenged linoleum, cardboard, to make a patchwork. The cardboard and linoleum were slowly rotting, the plywood had been stolen for God knew what. It was surprising that more of the metal hadn’t been scrapped, but I’d lay odds that all the copper wiring left over had been sold to the recycling plant. I wondered if any of the DJs had been back to collect their stereo equipment since the moment I’d dropped down from the ceiling and started killing Traders.

If they hadn’t been back, some foolhardy asshole had probably stumbled across it. People are too inquisitive for their own goddamn good.

Especially hunters. It’s one of the things that makes us, well, us.

A low unhealthy blot of rectangular blackness sat in the middle of the dance floor. It pulsed like an obscene heart, and I checked the moon cycle inside my head again. Dark moon was best for this, and we had a week of waxing and another two of waning before the walls between here and Hell were even close to gapping without some serious help.

So this was a secondary site? But it was further along than the one at Henderson Hill. The altar crouched like a live beast, dozing in the middle of all that empty space. My blue eye caught flashes of ill intent, nasty little tingles of sorcery and bad feeling.

The bezoar stilled in my pocket, tiny tremors like a frightened rabbit quivering through heavy leather. I paused, silent as cancer or a snake under a rock, weight braced and the gun low but ready.

The bezoar quit trembling and tugged, very faintly.

Straight down.

The catwalk screeched as I pushed off, airborne and turning. I was over the railing and dropping like a stone. Gunfire crackled, bullets spattering as the ’breed hissed up at me, leaping from a gantry below, bone claws extended and the mask fluttering at its edges.

A moment of sheer savage glee, white-hot, went through me. You again? Oh, good. Here, have some of this aggression I’ve been saving up.

Falling. Firing into him as I twisted, his claws tangling in my coat and shredding the leather even further. He was aiming for the bezoar, I realized as my foot flicked out. There was no weight behind the kick since we were both in midair, but it did jolt home and we tumbled free of each other, leather ripping. I was screaming, a rising cry of female effort tearing through the gloom with a bright razor edge.

Impact. We hit the altar squarely. No give; it was like hitting concrete. Nothing broke for once, because I spilled over to the side and rolled free, bleeding momentum. It was a good thing, too, because he was leaping for me. The gun jerked up instinctively. Fire burst from the muzzle, I hit him square in the chest and rolled, whip jerking loose. Knee up, boot grinding in anonymous dust and dirt, a shard of broken glass eating itself into smaller pieces under the steelshod heel. Striking true, the jangling end of the whip sparking with fierce blue light. He tumbled aside, soundless, black ichor spattering.

I scrambled up. Time to press my advantage. Shot him twice more, tracking him, every bullet now striking home because the world had turned into a clear crystal dish with my path mapped out in a ribbon of light.

When you fight every night, reflex takes on a whole new meaning. Sometimes, and only sometimes, you hit a fight where everything comes together. Your entire body dilates and compresses at the same time, and suddenly everything is easy. I’ve heard it called a peak experience. There’s nothing peak about it—you find that out the next evening, when you’ve pulled a muscle or two and you roll out of bed groaning to do it all again.

But while it lasts, it’s better than chocolate.

I knew where he was going to move next, and fired before he could get there. The third shot took him in the ball of the shoulder joint and he was down, flopping like a landed fish. White chips of something like bone showed in the mess of his shoulder, black silk shredding. I was on him in a heartbeat, dropping the whip and driving the knife into hellbreed flesh with a solid tchuk! like a solid axe sinking into dry wood. My right-hand gun slid into its holster, because I knew this was going to be a knife fight from here on out.

Something was wrong. It nagged at the clarity of action, but I shoved it aside because I had to concentrate now.

He roared and threw me off. I careened, weightless, hanging in the air a moment before hitting a tangle of metal struts with a crunch. Hot agony speared my left arm and I thrashed, falling with a thud and narrowly missing cracking my head against a sharp-sheared edge. The snap of my left humerus breaking was a red scream, but I was on my feet again in a moment, hurling myself forward to meet the hellbreed with another shattering jolt. It tore the mask halfway free, and I caught a glimpse of copper skin and an alien, gaping vertical slit of a maw before my second-biggest knife dragged through hellbreed flesh like it was water, spilling noisome reek in a heavy gush.

No wonder he doesn’t talk. A fleeting thought; that orifice didn’t look like it could shape a single word.

But something was definitely wrong. He didn’t try to rip my spleen out the hard way, and something about his skin nagged at me. His bony arms closed around me with a crackle like lightning. He pitched aside, inhuman muscles coiling and releasing, and a heaving, grinding sound filled the world, ending with a jarring clang.

We rolled, fetching up against steel bars with a stunning jolt. But I had my largest knife out, too. Silver sizzled, parting tainted flesh. I twisted it, wrist straining and arm bent oddly, the broken edges of my left humerus grinding together so hard black sparkles danced over my vision. Great heaving, sobbing breaths as my ribs flickered. The hellbreed’s body jerked, corruption spilling through its tissues. The gaping, vertical maw of the mouth under the mask champed, yellow foam painting its thin lipless edges.

Shit. I hadn’t meant to kill him so completely—I’d thought he was more durable. Now who was I going to question?

Wait a second, Jill. This guy’s all wrong.

I struggled free of the swiftly decomposing remnants of the body, black silk sizzling a little as the ichor worked at it. The mask was a twisted rag, and his eyes were now collapsing holes. But something was wrong, very wrong, and when I raised my head, the silver still buzzing in my hair, I finally realized why he hadn’t eviscerated me.

He’d been too busy knocking me into the trap.

What had seemed a random jumble of metal had fallen from the ceiling, fresh weld spots glowing with the peculiar white gleam of orichalc. Part of it fitted over the empty altar, caging it securely, and the entire thing quivered around me like it wanted to take flight. The metal had driven deep into the concrete, like fingers sinking into butter.

The body on the floor really started to stink. I froze, examining the tangle of metal now webbing us both.

An orichalc-tainted cage? What the—

A faint movement, silk against inhuman skin. I cleared leather in an instant, and the guns didn’t dip as the clarity of battle left me and I began to suspect I was in deep fucking shit.

The ’breed melded out of the gloom, at the far end of the dance floor. The bezoar twitched in my pocket again, demonic little fingers tugging at my coat. Same compact build, same flutter of black silk, and maggot-white skin. The mask moved slightly as whatever was under it gapped its wide mouth, breathing softly.

He was white, not copper-skinned.

Oh, fucking hell.

I took two steps forward. It brought me closer to the crazycrack jumble of steel, and the metal moved. Runes crawled over it, visible only to my blue eye—weird, angular writing, curved only in specific spots. It glowed a sickly gold, moving like a spider’s scuttle when the web is touched.

Chaldean. Just like Belisa’s new necklace.

Think, Jill. Think fast. I drew back. Saw my whip handle on the other side of the bars, just barely in reach, the rest of the leather and silver jangles stretching out across the floor in a ribbon of stars. I leapt for it, because the ’breed at the other end of the dance floor twitched. If I could reach the whip I could—

POW!

My fingertips scraped concrete before I was flung away. I hit the cage on the other side, and the Chaldean struck again like a snake, tossing me down to the floor. The screaming I heard from far away was me. My voice cracked, raging in a high unlovely torrent of obscenities.

The ’breed hissed as he twitched my whip out of the way with the tip of one slippered foot. I realized the other masked ’breed hadn’t been wearing those goddamn tabi footies, either. He’d been a double.

I cursed myself for running on emotion instead of brains right before the cold concrete darkness reached up to swallow me.