Angel Town

34

There was nobody on the streets. I wasn’t surprised—even numbskull civilians will stay inside when the sky looks like a ripening bruise and the air is full of scorching that feels like an ice bath. Now that we were going the way they wanted, the ’breed hung back, letting the hounds nip and harry us through the streets. I made a few attempts to shake them, just because I don’t like being chased. Mother Mary on a pogo stick, how I hate to be pursued.

But there was nothing left to do, and Gilberto did not look good. He clutched at the gun like it was a Grail, and his lips moved a little as if he was praying.

It was a good idea, but I had no time.

“You hear me?” I finished, as we hit International Way and the four lanes ribboned around us, every light turning green as we sped through, tires smoking and the hellhounds pouring around us in a steaming wave. “No heroics, Gil. You get the fuck out of here and strike for Ridgefield. Leon’ll take you in.”

Gil’s chin set stubbornly.

“Gilberto. You’re a liability, not a help. You go, or I swear to God I’ll beat the shit out of you myself.” It was a good threat. I even sounded like I meant it.

“You goin’ in there to die.” Flatly, as if he was talking about the nice weather we were having lately. “Mi hermano, he look like this, like you. Right before he got shot.”

I almost winced. His brother was not a safe subject, the past reaching out its tentacles to strangle us all. “They can’t kill me, kid.” I sounded weary even to myself. “Perry needs me for this.” A Trader can steal a Talisman, but not wield it. Not for very long, anyway—but if he’s using it to power the hellmouth…Still, I’m the Judas for the Other Side. I have to make it a little longer, right?

It was so not a comforting thought.

Gilberto’s chin set itself, stubbornly. “So I go in. Watch your back.”

“No.”

“Profesora—”

“No, Gil. You have your orders, goddammit.”

“Profesora—”

“No.” I said it a lot more sharply than I meant to, and hit the brakes, slewing us sideways as International dove down to follow the river. The stadium was here, hulking like a giant animal over a bone, one of the places in the city where you can’t see the huge granite Jesus on top of Mercy General. Sometimes I’m pretty sure it’s an act of will that keeps that particular landmark from being visible in some pockets of urban real estate. “I’m counting on you, Gilberto. Don’t let me down.”

He mumbled something. I smashed the accelerator again, spun us into another turn, stood on the brake. “I can’t hear you, apprentice.” Snap of command.

“Si,” he said, scowling. “Si, profesora.” Just like a good soldier.

Just like me, when Mikhail would tell me what was what. Would I ever reach the point where I’d trade Gil for my own mark, sell him to Perry to buy a little more time? Or bargain him into it out of love, believing that he could do what I couldn’t and stop el rubio Diablo from spinning the wheel and landing a double zero?

I don’t want to find out. It ends here. “Good fucking deal.” We rocked to a stop, tire smoke rising in sharp-toothed shapes around us. The hellhounds flowed in a leaping circle, stormlight running wetly over their smoking hides as thunder rumbled again. “Gil…”

He stared out the window, sallow, pitted jaw working.

“You’re my apprentice,” I said, finally. “And you’re a good one. You won’t understand for a long, long time. But I love you, and I’m sorry. It’s not your fault.”

I hit the latch and was outside in a hot second, leaning down to glance through the back window. “Stay with Gil,” I said, sharply, and the dogsbody settled into the backseat, whining. Every hair on my body tried to stand straight up, I heard hellhound claws skritching and scratching, and the splatter of foam from their panting mouths. The circle tightened, pressing closer, and I glanced up at the sky.

The clouds lowered, sickly greenish-black. Lightning crawled through their billows, occasionally lancing with a crack like a belt hitting naked flesh. I slammed the door, Gilberto already shimmying over into the driver’s side. The Cadillac purred, a plastic rosary swinging from the rearview—maybe it was Father Gui’s, maybe Rosa’s—and Gilberto stared through the window, his dark eyes suddenly wet.

I told him what I wish Misha had told me, I realized, and swallowed hard. The hellhounds didn’t draw any closer.

I stepped back once, twice. The engine revved, the tires chirped…

…and the hellhounds flowed aside at the last moment, leaving a clear path for Gilberto as the wine-red Caddy shot up Martin Luther, its engine singing in mingled pain and relief.

The Santa Luz Stadium and Convention Center was a squat, graceless concrete dome, pathways cut up and down its sides like ribbons of frosting on a particularly nasty soot-gray cake. Normally, a gigantic American flag fluttered atop it, waving like a stripper’s pasty, but the three squat glass towers of the nearby convention center leered at an empty flagpole now, reflecting bright white flashes as the storm closed over Santa Luz. No rain, everything hot with that queer icy heat, the edges of my coat flirting as the wind teased them. My right hand touched a gun, and I felt very exposed standing here.

Almost naked.

I swallowed again, waited as the Cadillac’s roar was lost even to my jacked-up hearing. “Do svidanye,” I whispered. My left hand had already closed around the whip’s handle.

If they wanted me to go in there, they were going to have to work for it.

Unfortunately, the hellhounds took me up on the challenge. They moved in, heads down and snaking, a whole massed tide of them, and I gave ground. The whip flicked, breaking tough skin and loosing spatters of stinking ichor, but I didn’t draw the gun.

I had no bullets to waste, now.

They herded me past the ticket booths—all their glass shattered, glinting back little fractures of lightning—and the crowd-control turnstiles, the aluminum tubes twisted back in weird contorted flower-shapes. Someone had certainly been smoothing the path for me.

The primrose path, Jillybean. All the way down to Hell.

When the dogs got too close I flicked the whip at them, and one or two screamed in high, childlike voices. Thunder was a constant roar now, and I felt the sun touch the horizon, beginning its slow nightly drowning. The city shivered, concrete groaning, and the wind from the river howled through empty parking lots, tearing at the edges of the dome.

Darkness rose from the corners of the earth, and the hellhounds herded me into a long, low corridor. I heard a mutter, the bulk of the storm shut away. They’d stopped steaming under the lash of daylight, but the press of their bodies made the air quiver with unhealthy heat.

The corridor curved, and for a long time it seemed like I’d be in it forever, the hounds pressing forward to nip at and drive me along, my whip flicking with a jingle of blessed silver every few moments to hold them back. I skip-shuffled along, my back to one wall or the other, and ghastly fluorescent tubes fizzed and blinked overhead. Chipped paint on the concrete turned sickly as the hounds brushed against it, and the little dapples of my sea-urchin aura showed up, punctuating the etheric bruising with tiny crackles.

The corridor terminated in a set of double doors, pulsing as the air behind them pressed close with a crowd-murmur. The hounds stopped, some of them crouching on their haunches, tongues lolling and yellow foam dripping, wriggling into cracks in the floor with subtle hisses.

He must really be excited. I bit back a bitter little laugh. All this trouble, Perry, when you knew I’d show up anyway.

One of the hounds hiss-growled very softly, its lip curling back from glassine teeth. I jingled the whip and the beast cowered back into the mass.

Gonna see what’s behind Door Number One, Jillian? Oh yeah, you bet. Right now. I eased along the wall, keeping an eye on the hellhounds. Right fucking now. He’s been setting this up for decades.

Be a shame to keep him waiting.

I pushed against the crossbar. The door opened, sterile white light flooded through, and the sound of a crowd belched into the hall on a tide of dry candy corruption. The hounds pressed further back, and for a moment I considered taking them on until I ran out of ammo.

But that would be a waste. I had better things to use my bullets on.

I braced the door wide and stepped out into the glare.

35

Whatever game we were going to be playing, it wasn’t baseball.

The playing field was venomous green, usually Astroturf but now transmuted into short fleshy spikes that twisted and rippled obscenely as the crowd-roar passed over them. The glare was amazing, a nuclear flash prolonged until it was a scream of whiteness, a world-killing light. I blinked, my eyes watering, and forced myself to scan.

The field was bare and green, an indecent hump in the middle with a low block of darkness placed precisely on its crest. The sound was immense, swelling through feedback and screaming, the roar lifting my hair and blowing it back as etheric bruising tightened and my aura sparked, every inch of silver on me running with blue light.

It halted, a sudden silence filling the vast dome, and that quiet stole all the breath out of my lungs, the way a sudden jolt at the end of a rope will. Training clamped down, my lungs shocked back into working and my pulse dropping as my right-hand gun cleared leather. A rush of warm air slid past me and toward the closing doors; they latched shut with the clicks of bullets loaded in a clip.

Perry laughed. He spread his arms and grinned with sheer mad good humor. “Darling! One appreciates punctuality in a woman, almost as much as one appreciates beauty. Then again, my dearest one, you are so worth waiting for.”

He wore black. A thin V-neck sweater and narrow pleated trousers, a sword of darkness against all the glare. His hair was pale tarnished silk, and his eyes glowed hellhound-blue. The change from his usual white linen was a shock, too, and my busy little brain started worrying at it. What did it mean?

Just let it go, Jill. You’ll find out soon enough.

Super-acute senses are sometimes a curse. My eyes stung, but I caught movement up in the stadium seats, behind the screen of glare. How many? Sounds like a lot, but echoes, hard to tell. Jesus. I kept the gun trained on Perry, shook the whip slightly to assure myself of free play. “Actually, Hyperion, I’m early.”

“We can argue later, my dove. And Brother Michael?”

“He sends his love.” An answering grin pulled my lips back from my teeth. “You’re being an asshole, Perry.”

“Oh, you wound me. I have kept faith with you in every possible way. I allow you so much more than I would ever allow another.” He backed up a step, two, his wingtips touching the fat blades of not-grass with slight squelching sounds. “For example, it was necessary to allow you to betray me. Or whatever you thought you were doing, darling. I don’t expect you to be anything other than what you are.”

“Which is what, Perry? What do you think I am?”

“My unwilling ally, darling. My enfleshment, my entrapment, and my lovely, lovely doom. In the old sense, of course. Doom as in ‘inescapable.’” He actually lifted a hand and blew me a kiss. A susurrus went through the invisible crowd, a breaker of whispered titters. “Come here, dearest. Come see what your suitor has created, all for you.”

I shot myself in the head to get away from you, Perry. Don’t pretend you’ve got my interests at heart. But sick knowledge impelled me forward.

I had to see.

The altar was long and low, made of black volcanic glass instead of a chunk of a hangman’s tree. I took it in with short, sipping little glances, between scanning the rest of the stadium. It seats an ungodly number of people for Wheelwrights games and other foolishness, a real sink of taxpayer dollars from the seventies when everything was whiskey-a-go-go out here in the desert. Santa Luz fought like hell to get the stadium pried out of the grip of the Noches County seat, and the success was Pyrrhic when everything went over budget and repairs started coming due.

And now it was full of hellbreed and Traders, bright-eyed and staring, whispering at each other. Popcorn passed from hand to hand, and I smelled hot dogs and hellbreed. The place wasn’t quite packed yet, but it was filling up.

This is not good.

My pulse settled down. The sudden calm would be ominous, because it meant I was ready for action. But Perry just smiled, and the scuffle of finding seats intensified.

It was the altar’s surface that made my throat seize up and my stomach sink. Twisted runes—the closest you can get to Helletöng in written form—were scored deep into the volcanic glass, their sharp edges full of diseased blue hellfire. There was a chalice of heavy golden metal, full of clotted scum. Not gold, because pure elemental metal—copper, silver, gold—is always a bane to them. Silver works best, and the silver in my hair was sparking continuously now. My apprentice-ring was dangerously warm.

There were other things on the altar. Deformed claws, lumps of meat. Organs from their victims, a loop of hanging-rope, a knife of sharp alien geometry…and the Lance.

La Primera Lanza del Destino, wrenched from its hiding spot at Sacred Grace, lay on the unholy altar, curls of steam rising around it as it shivered uneasily.

A long, fluted cylinder of dark, stained wood, or a metal veined and carved to look like wood. It vibrated also, etheric force barely held in check, and its long, leaf-shaped blades looked too delicate to do any harm, both of them trembling like high school kids on a first date.

The world spun out from under me. I knew what it was, now. Hutch’s books had shown me everything once I knew where to look.

The granddaddy of all Talismans, the one all other Spears are copied from, the Spear of Undoing. No wonder the Church had kept it so secret. It was older than the pagans, far older than the savior they prayed to, and it probably hadn’t been anywhere near his martyrdom…but still. It was a Major Talisman, and you don’t leave those lying around. Especially when they have a nasty habit of being able to unmake things.

“It’s not going to work.” My voice was a thin tremor from the dry cave of my mouth. “There’s no way it’s going to work.”

“Oh, you’re such a pessimist.” Perry sighed. “We have everything we need, my dearest. You and I will deal with my master, the hellmouth will remain open, and when the smoke has cleared, we shall be the undisputed rulers of a world remade in our own image.”

Whose image? Not mine, you bastard. “Your master?”

“Father, master, whatever.” He shrugged. “You didn’t think I was common, did you, Kiss? I’ve taken an interest in your line for a very long time. And in Dresden, lo these many years ago, your predecessor Jack Karma and I had a meeting of minds. I gave him something he wanted, he gave me something I needed. And beautiful music was made.”

This much, at least, I knew about. “Argoth. Your father?”

“One of many, darling. I told you, I am Legion. But he is very, very angry. You’ve barred him twice now. Ever since dear Jack sent him back, he’s been aching and frothing to return and play games in this most fascinating of worlds. And to reclaim me, of course.” He tilted his head, grinning at me. The silence was full of whispers, nasty mouthings, wet silk against sweating legs. “He thinks I’m going to help him.”

“Aren’t you?” I edged closer to the altar, but Perry resolved out of thin air next to me. The air tore itself apart with malevolent children’s laughter. His fingers closed around my upper arm, slim steel bands, and I went very still, my left hand still on my whip handle.

“Now, now. Close enough for the moment. Don’t be hasty.” His fingers flicked, claws sliding free of pale narrow hardness, and leather tore. Perry grabbed my wrist, locking it.

He drew in a deep breath, his ribs crackling as they expanded. “My children! ” he roared, and I almost flinched. His fingers bit down, and he shoved me back from the altar. “Now is the hour of our glory! ”

“Glory! ” A sea’s foaming roil. The crowd went wild, arms lifted, claws and fists shaken. They howled and screamed and yapped, Trader and damned, all of them twisting under their screens of human flesh.

I stumbled back, using Perry’s shove to get some space. Ran through the next few minutes in my head. There was just too much that could go wrong—

“Open the door! ” Perry yelled, and the exotic thought that I was going to witness the creation of a hellmouth got me moving.

“The door, the door! ” the crowd screamed back, and surged forward against the metal rails keeping them off the ten-foot drop to the stadium’s floor. “Open the door! ”

Thou Who, I thought, as my weight dropped back into my left leg, muscles tensing in preparation. Thou Who hast given me to fight evil, protect me, keep me from harm.

It was now or never. I exploded into a leap, aiming for the altar. If I could get my hands on the Lance—

Except it was too late. The gem on my wrist screamed, a high thin note like glass shivering into breaking, and Perry grabbed my ankle. He twisted, his fingers sinking into my boot with a sickening crunch, and hurled me across the field.

36

Tucking, rolling, the not-grass splorching underneath me and sending up a rank, juicy reek. I fetched up against the goalpost at the north end of the field, and the gigantic hollow sound it made would have been funny if the red rage of pain hadn’t swallowed me whole. I was on my feet in an instant, whip shaken free and the not-grass suddenly sticky underfoot, gripping my bootsoles like an angry insect-eating carpet. The gem wailed, my ribs popping out with crunching wet noises, and I whooped in a breath as I jagged to the side, heel grinding down and my entire body a scream of agony. The whip struck across Perry’s chest, silver biting, flaying his sweater and the white marble-hard shell underneath.

“Lovely! ” he screamed. “Just like old times, Kiss! Kiss me again! ”

Backing up, a glance shot at the altar where the ’breed made a circle, pushing the Traders in front of them. Slack-mouthed, their eyes bright with the shine of the dusted, the Traders pressed forward, and the deep thrumming all through the stadium wasn’t just the blood in my ears.

That’s where he’s going to get the initial charge to break open the hellmouth. Traders. A whole lot of them.

And with that much ritual death, plus a Talisman to fuel it, he could keep a gap in the walls of the world open for a while.

It made a mad sort of sense, really. Innocent flesh breaks the walls between here and Hell better than anything else, but in a pinch other death will do. And if it’s the death of the damned, it’s the next best thing to innocent. Because none of the damned ever really thinks they’re going to be the one.

Death is for other people, like payment and guilt. The damned believe they’re special.

I suppose we all believe that, way down deep.

The gun spoke twice, holes blown in Perry’s sweater. Black ichor flew, splattering, but not enough of it. Perry grinned, a death’s-head smile, and leapt for me. I faded back, still firing, and the fact that I still didn’t know nearly enough about exactly what he was rose up to bite me.

He produced hellfire in the blue spectrum, when anything above orange is seriously bad news. He wasn’t an arkeus or a talyn, because he had always been all-too-disturbingly physical. And right now he was acting like the bullets were bee stings—a little irritating, certainly, but not putting him down the way a load of silver should.

He flashed through space with the stuttering, eerie speed of hellbreed, but I was one step ahead of him, leaping up and to the side as muscles pulled against flash-healing bones in my side and my ankle gave an almost-unheeded flare of sick burning pain. The squelching underfoot heaved, whatever had taken the place of Astroturf trying to throw me, and if I could just get my hands on the Lance and a few more seconds’ lead time I could disrupt the altar and maybe take down enough of them to—

Perry hit me with another sickening sound, and I flew up into the bleachers, twisting and firing as blood burst from my lips. Red blood, no trace of black corruption. The gem screamed, pumping etheric force through me on a wave of bright white, and the cry was echoed by the crowd at the altar. Traders were being pulled down, hellbreed hands narrow and hard and clawed and hairy quelling their struggles as the mood inside the stadium tipped over into glee and terror.

The Traders had Traded, and now the bill was due.

He hopped up the bleachers towards me, black wingtips leaving wet black prints, the crowd had pulled away from this section and I suspected that was why he’d thrown me up here. He was playing with me, cat with mouse, and the knowledge filled me with welcome fury.

Do not get angry, Mikhail had always warned me. Makes you stupid.

I couldn’t help it.

The Traders began screaming, and the stadium was an echo chamber, collecting the cries in massive sheaves and throwing them back down to earth. Didn’t count on being the sacrifice, did you? Serves you right. I was up on my feet again, steel-shod heels chiming soundlessly as I found my balance in a wide aisle, Perry hopping up the steps in a mockery of dancing, his joints moving in sickeningly wrong jerks.

The stadium howled, concrete vibrating in distress, and Perry flung out a hand. Blue hellfire splashed up the seats to my right. I was already moving, flinging myself through a wall of superheated air, leather crisping and smoking, landing braced on two seats and pushing off, twisting in midair as my coat gave a snap like wet laundry, and my feet skidded across the not-grass, throwing up huge chunks of rotting foulness. Traders were dying in droves, the deep rumbling of Helletöng swallowing their screams whole, and a pale oval of brightness was spinning over the altar.

Jesus Christ! It was going too quickly—of course, he’d had a lot of time to prepare. The altar was heaped with harvested organs, and the Traders were falling at the hands of the hellbreed they’d Traded with, corruption-reek filling up the vast bowl space. The bodies fell, twitching, dust eating through them and spiraling up on hot drafts, spinning eddies of it coalescing and sprouting curse-wings. The baby curses flapped, squawking in ’töng, and glaring white light stabbed through me as Perry hit me again, driving me down into the not-grass. I choked, spitting to clear my mouth, my abused ribs giving another howl, and the knife was in my hand as we rolled to a stop, the blade dragging against his shell and biting in, silver sparking and hissing.

He jerked back as if stung, grabbed my wrist, and twisted, the knifeblade running with blue light, ichor sizzling on the metal. I punched him twice with my free hand, fist braced with my whip handle, black ichor flying. I spat again, tasting foul oil-soaked dirt, knee coming up as my heel stamped down, but he was too heavy and getting heavier, the physical world rippling around him as etheric force ran through us both. The gem was a wild high melody over the subsonic fright-train grumble of ’töng, and I was suddenly in the desert again, clawing my way up out of sand with the hornets buzzing and eating all over me, screaming and choking as ectoplasm and grit filled my mouth.

“Beautiful! ” Perry yelled in my ear, even though I punched him again. His head snapped back, more ichor flew, and he was grinning through a thin black mask of it as his chin came back down.

I screamed, struggling, and the world skipped like someone had jostled the CD player it was spinning in. It came back, but only at a quarter of its usual speed, the curse-birds gaining strength and mass and slowly beating their wings and the screams of dying Traders running like colored oil on a wet plate.

Perry held my wrists. He was impossibly heavy, as if gravity had decided he was an exception to every rule. Ichor dripped down his face, and he blinked at me, first one mad blue eye, then the other. “Judith,” he crooned, under the soupy feedback of the titanic noise raging in slow motion around us. “My darling. My flesh.”

Don’t. Call. Me. That. Rage ignited, I heaved up under him, breaking my right hand free with another screaming twist. The knife flicked, biting his abdomen again. We rolled, the fetid green juice of the crushed not-grass sliding and slipping over us both like birth fluid.

The world snapped forward, catching up with itself, and I heard a familiar battlefield yell.

Thank fucking God. Relief then, hot and acid against my throat.

The hunters had arrived.

37

The tranced Traders were still dying, but now the hellbreed were dying too. I saw Benny Cross from Louisiana, his ferret face alight as he opened fire with both guns; Sloane from gray rain-drenched Seattle, the charms in his hair chiming as he swung two silver-plated escrima sticks, Leon from Ridgefield, his battered tan duster scorched and spotted with blood while Rosita, his modified rifle, roared. Thierry Parvus from Saskatchewan, dropping out of the sky like God’s avenging while the copper charms on his boots’ fringes rattled and spat, Emoke Kolada and Dmitri Roslan, John Blake and John Carver and John Gray and Jack Quint and Jack Hell, Louis Darmor and MaryAnn Bright, too many to list. Some of them I only knew from word of mouth, others I knew because I’d worked with them; a few had come to Santa Luz to help out once or twice and I’d returned the favor. Many of them I didn’t know at all, but they were all hunters, elemental metal jingling and long coats swinging as they waded into the fray, their auras cracking with sea-urchin spikes like my own.

Their cries were a bright counterpoint over the rumble of ’töng, and I could have wept. Because we do something the ’breed don’t ever do: we work together. It means every hunter is worth more than their weight when it comes to holding back Hell’s tide; even when there’s a mass of them, every one of Hell’s scions only thinks of his own advantage. The hunters moved in tightly disciplined bands, cutting through the crowds, and I saw Anya Devi, her beads running with blue light and Benny Cross at her back, heading straight for the altar.

If even one of us could reach the altar, we could nip Perry’s little plan right in the ass.

Oh, God, oh God thank you—

Perry snarled, my fingers in his hair, and I slammed his skull against the yielding ground. It felt wonderful, so I did it again, realized it wasn’t going to do any good just as he got his wits about him and heaved up, tossing me away. I landed catfooted, had my balance in a split second, and leapt after him.

He was heading for the altar. He was too impossibly fast, streaking through trembling, overloaded reality. Anya was bogged down in a knot of struggling ’breed and Traders, her guns literally blazing and her scream of frustration a rising hawk-cry of effort.

Don’t worry, I’m on it, just keep going—

Another roar filled the stadium, and I didn’t have time to blink or even really register the fact that Weres had begun pouring into the stadium through flung-wide doors, leaping gracefully and flickering between animal and human form, clustering dazed Traders and bringing them down, trying like hell to avoid the ’breed. Lionesses, tawny-armed and honey-haired, working together to take down their prey, other cat Weres simply, magnificently fought; the bird Weres flickered through their feathered changeforms and raked with long talons. If they could keep the Traders away from the ritual death meted out near the altar, just maybe…

But we were doomed, because Perry was faster than all of us. He cleared a thrashing knot of ’breed in a single leap, and hurled himself at the pale oval spinning atop the altar’s black crouch. The curse-birds swarmed down, ripping past him in black bullet-shreds, and the oval became a dome of pitiless white light.

He couldn’t touch a Major Talisman. But he didn’t have to. All he had to do was get it close enough to the hungry orifice.

His foot flicked out, and he kicked the Lance directly into the incipient hellmouth.

The world exploded.

I was down and rolling as the shockwave passed over me, the fabric of reality bunching and twisting as it was torn rudely open. Bodies went flying, ichor splattering, and the noise was so big I moved in a bubble of silence as soon as it started, hot fluid trickles slipping down from my ears, kissing my neck. The pain was silver nails driven through my skull, a warm gush of blood loosing itself from my nose, but I was already committed to the leap. A collapsing hellbreed, his mouth a soundless scream of agony, folded as my boot kissed the top of his head, propelling me forward, my whip hand flicking forward and the gun in my other hand now.

Too late. The door was open.

Hellbreath streamed free, a wave of heat so fierce it was cold, and it was a good thing I was temporarily deaf. Surviving Traders fell, hands clapped to their ears, screaming silently. I had no time to think about how the Weres were handling this, I was too busy, bracing myself for the hit as a tide of half-seen shapes burst free of the hole in the world.

This wasn’t a regular portal, a hair-thin millisecond gap in the world for something to slip through. This was a full-fledged hellmouth, the dome of white light an obscene abscess swelling, pushing against the altar’s surface, hellbreed crawling out of the yawning light as Hell shoved them free.

I strained through air gone thick as lead, committed to my leap, as the mouth pulsed once, drooling hellbreed and the shadowy forms of arkeus like pus. Perry lifted his arms, braced against the flood of his kith and kin, and leaned forward. His mouth stretched, and the long grinding of Helletöng was a single word, rubbing through the deaf-noise and spearing every cell of my body.

The hole clotted, and for one second as I hung above him I thought perhaps it had closed of its own accord. But no, it was just heaving around something almost too big for it, and I must have known on some level. Because the gun was back on its holster before I hit the ground, my whip jolting free, and I dove for the altar as the hellmouth pursed its thin lips and vomited.

The gem on my wrist gave a hard, painful jerk. My whip uncoiled, silver jangling silently. My right-hand gun spoke, burning flooding my arm and the gem shrieking. If I hadn’t been swimming in so much pain already, the sudden cramp might have brought me to my knees.

I opened my mouth to scream if I had to, but there was no time. The world burst out into hypercolor, even more vivid than the superacute senses the gem gave me. At the same time, everything slowed down, my hip popping forward because always, in whip and stave work, it’s the hip that leads. Temporary deafness fraying at the edges as the whip stretched, blurring-fast, and the thing vomited through the hellmouth leaned back, its foot crushing against the wooden Lance as it shuddered on the altar’s top. Ash rose as the Lance twisted, bits of it grinding away finer and finer as the hellmouth chewed at its stored-up power.

The thing that had come through was an amorphous bipedal shape, silhouetted against the glow—hellbreed are like Elder Gods, they do not dress when they are at home, but when they come over into the physical they need some kind of shape. There’s a moment just as they’re coming through where you can glimpse their alienness, and it can drive you howlingly, gratefully insane.

But I was already halfway there, fury rising inside me. A chilling, glassy sound broke out of my mouth, burning my throat. Even through the deafness I heard it, like murder in a cold room at midnight, and we struck—the whip and I—at the same time, with physical and etheric force.

And we got his attention.

The world went white. Landing, hard, throwing up a sheet of juicy foul green and clods of oily black not-dirt, knocking over hellbreed like ninepins, the jolt snapping bones with sweet pain, blood bursting free in scarlet banners. The gem screamed on my wrist, and a shock ran through me from crown to feet as it tried to patch me up and get me fighting again. Everything tilted sideways, and something damp kissed my cheek.

Rain. It was rain. The roof was crumbling, concrete chunks falling with silent, eerie grace, smoke thinning as water fell from the sky and lightning flashed again and again.

They had come.

They shone, sliding down through the gaps in the dissolving roof like cosmic firemen, clarity glittering on their armor and their wings. No guns for them—they had swords and slender spears, bows and knives, chains and flails. They moved among the hellbreed, winnowing, and Hell’s scions were screaming in terror but still standing to fight.

They had no choice.

The clarity around the newcomers shone through the hellbreeds’ twisting, stripping off their masks and the rotten apple-bloom of damned beauty.

He landed next to me, his hair a furnace of gold and his blue eyes alight, and leaned down. The gem gave a heatless, massive twinge all through my broken bones. His hand closed around mine and he pulled as if I weighed less than nothing, hauling me to my feet.

“This is the help we can give! ” Michael the Caretaker said. The words cut through the deafness, laid right in the center of my brain. I was so far gone I didn’t even feel a weary satisfaction at seeing the wings behind him, glorious white and feathered like a vulture’s, spread wide, glowing like the sun. “Human hands must end this! ”

Oh, I’ll end it, I thought, and another cold, adrenaline-fueled little laugh burst out of me as Michael swung aside, his sword coming up with a sweet singing, cleaving the cringing air.

Perry fell back, snarling, and he had a sword of his own. Its blade was tarry black, drinking in the light, but I promptly shelved him as a problem and looked to find the badass who had just stepped through from Hell.

I’d settle Perry’s hash later. Still, if the caretaker wanted to save me the trouble, that was fine with me. I had other fish to kill.

38

The hole in the world glowed white-hot, and more hellbreed were draining through. The big one—Argoth, a nightmare made flesh now—crouched as he finished settling into form, a sheet of glaucous film tearing from the inside as he used his claws. He stood, naked, and my boots were thudding onto the squishy field, jolting agony through me like wine, laughing at the idea that I could be stopped by the blood I was losing or a little thing like the broken bones grating together, desperately trying to heal as the gem sang a descant of impossible, strained beauty.

I left the ground, sound coming back in stuttering bursts as my eardrums healed with spikes of wet red pain. Roaring, screaming, weeping, the cracks of thunder and wet sizzling sounds, hunters screaming their battle cries and Weres making a lot of noise, gunfire spattering—

Impact. Or not. I missed him.

He twisted aside, his mad blue eyes wide with delight, and the first shock was that he looked like Perry. Or maybe Perry was just a pale copy of this creature, a marvel of twisted pale beauty, his mouth a cruelly luscious crimson slash, his ears coming up to high points poking through the frayed mat of spun-platinum hair. Force transferred and I was thrown, the whip handle biting my hands as it was ripped free and the gem resonating to the chaos around me. Landed again, all the breath and sense knocked out of me. My body decided now was a fine time to just take a little vacation. Just lay there and breathe for a second, except I couldn’t get any air in.

Get UP! But nothing would obey me, my hands flayed and the broken bones healing but too slowly, everything inside me straining and even my will—that trainable, teachable thing that drives the body, that makes it obey—wasn’t working. What the mind requires, the body will do; but the body has its limits. Sorcerous gem or not, I suspected I’d reached mine.

Well, maybe not suspected. More like, found out.

A shadow fell over me. My eyes rolled. It was Argoth, standing with the Lance shaking unhappily in his pale, beautifully shaped hand. It wept and strained to get away, ash rising on a hot updraft, and he snarled.

He shouldn’t have been able to touch it, but it was probably drained from holding the hellmouth open. Tracers of ash ribboned back as the hungry mouth yawed, wind screaming as it sucked, shrinking—but not fast enough. It was gorged with incredible power, and it would close itself—but Argoth was here.

Perry could do all sorts of crap he wasn’t supposed to; why should I have expected his father, original, whatever, to be different?

I noticed, with a variety of shocked, swimming amusement, that his long, amber-burnished fingernails were buffed. Well, if you’re going to step out of Hell, you might as well make sure you’ve got a manicure, right? It was the merry voice of doom, caroling inside my weary skull, but the only thing I felt was exhaustion and a great drowsy sense of having let them down.

Wake up! Move! It was my own voice, shrilling at me. Usually when I’m hurt bad there’s someone else inside my skull, pushing me.

But I had nobody left.

He lifted the wooden Lance, glare of lightning playing along the slick, ash-weeping blade, and a wide, beautiful-ugly, triumphant smile twisted his face. Now he looked like a hellbreed, the shadow of the thing freshly released from Hell’s cold, screaming confinement rippling under his skin.

I braced myself to die again.

Then his head jerked back, black ichor spattering. And again. Bullet holes bloomed on his chest, and my head lolled drunkenly enough to see Gilberto, wide-legged in the shooting stance I’d taught him, making his triangle and aiming nicely, squeeze the trigger again. His eyes were bright and lively, he was covered in black stinking ’breed rot, the bandage on his arm was torn and flapping, and the Eye of Sekhmet glowed on his chest, sending up a curl of smoke that wreathed his sallow, young-old face.

He was laughing. Even as Argoth let out a banshee wail that dwarfed all other sound and spun the spear, the bullet holes closing over and sealing the hurt away. Silver wasn’t going to put this bitch down.

The wall of sound hit Gil, and he tumbled over backward. But the dogsbody was already in the air, its blond hide streaked with spatters of smoking black, and it hit the baddest hellbreed I’d ever seen with a crunch I felt all the way down on the ground.

Now get up, Mikhail said inside my head, and I could swear…

No. I don’t need to swear. I saw.

One of the winged things was near me, a familiar hitching limp as he eased his sore knee, that clarity blooming over him in a waterfall of light. Not the sterile white nuclear light from the hellmouth, but the white of a clean sheet of paper, a freshly bleached sheet, sunshine on sugar sand, joy and sunrise. He leaned down, his hair a mop of pure silver, and grabbed my arm. It was the same hand, hard and callused from daily practice and nightly hunting. The same long nose and narrow mouth, the same pale blue eyes with dark lashes, the same cleft in his chin and the same vulnerable notch where his collarbones met the breastbone. He didn’t look tired, but there was still the faint shadow of knowledge in his eyes. His wings were iron-gray, like his hair used to be, and there was the scar along his jawline, now a thread of gold against his skin. And another scar on his throat, a thick, golden torq.

His mouth opened, but nothing came out. My teacher’s voice whispered directly inside my head, even as his lips soundlessly shaped the words.

Now get up, milaya, and kick bastard back to Hell where he belong.

He gave me a little push, as if we were in the sparring room and I had to do it again, but faster and better this time. I stumbled, glancing down to find my footing, new strength pouring through me and the gem resonating on my wrist.

When I looked up, he was gone. The dogsbody landed in a heap next to me, scrabbling weakly for a moment before going limp, twisted on itself. Its eyes fell shut, and it gave a little sigh.

Argoth grinned, licking his red, red lips. His tongue was purplish, shocking against the rest of his beauty, flickering between sharp white teeth. The world was tearing itself to pieces around us, but we stared at each other for a few heartbeats, and he lifted the warping, trembling Lance slightly.

I let out a long breath, my ribs finally healing fully with snapping crackles. The hellmouth pulsed behind him, casting knife-sharp twisting shadows, and the flood of Hell’s icy heat lifted my blood-soaked hair. I lifted my filthy hands, and the sharp pinpricks of Perry’s charms dug into my skull as they moved restlessly. The hornet buzz filled my head.

That’s so strange. Now I remember being dead.

Then he was on me, the Lance moving so fast it blurred, still wicked sharp even through the shredding of ash rising from every surface, screaming its bloodlust and defiance. But I’d thrown myself forward, already inside the arc of his attack, and grabbed.

My right hand closed on the Lance’s haft, and its chill jolted up my arms. Argoth had raw power, and a hellbreed’s ability to twist things into obeying him. But I was a hunter, and I was human, and I had an edge when it came to forcing a Major Talisman to do what I wanted it to.

Or so I hoped.

Because after all, we made the Talismans. They’re ours. They do not come from Hell.

My left hand clamped down over his, my fingers biting with preternatural strength, and we were face-to-face for a long, shattering moment while I drove him back. There was a warm wind behind me, and it smelled of peppery adrenaline and vodka, leather and musk and the warm smell of Mikhail’s skin as he lay beside me in our shared bed. I pushed, and the wind behind me wasn’t just Mikhail. It was my fellow hunters, Anya and Gilberto, and Monty and my cops; it was my city exhaling as dawn rose and shuddering as dusk fell, while I prowled its rooftops and alleys; it was the hornets buzzing and the spear singing a glassy bloodlust cry, the gem burning on my wrist and every inch of silver on me suddenly running with the same clarity that folded around the winged things.

And finally, it was Saul, his eyes dark with pleasure as he sighed into my hair. Saul cooking pancakes and yawning, his sleepy smile a reward all its own. Saul holding me while I wept, my own arms around him as we both shook, the promise of pain shared and halved in the darkness.

You will not survive, Michael had told me. You will have to sacrifice yourself again to destroy Hyperion.

All I felt, finally, was relief that Saul was safe with Galina.

I drove forward, legs pumping, and Argoth’s face corkcrewed in on itself as he realized what I was about to do. He tried to let go of the spear, but I had his right hand locked too. The gem sang on my wrist, a rising tide of light inside my bones.

I pushed against him, close as a lover, his hot rank breath in my face and his teeth champing, spattering me with yellow foam.

Not so pretty now, are we.

I threw us both into the hellmouth. The silver I was carrying and my hunter’s aura would disrupt it. The shock would shred my physical structure, but that was a small price to pay.

Wasn’t it?

Mercifully, everything went black.

39

Confusion.

“Hold her head up.” A familiar voice, but so tired, almost slurring the words. “Jesus.”

Stutter-flashes of light. Rumbling as the storm retreated, cold rain lashing down. I was wet all over, and freezing. Every part of me burned with savage pain. Someone’s arm under my head, sharp little charms biting into my skull. Heaving breaths; someone was moaning.

I’ll bet there’s a lot of wounded. Then, muzzy amazement. Wait.

“I’m not dead?” I actually said it out loud, my lips rubbery, sounding like a dumbfounded drunkard.

A short growl-cough of a laugh, one I recognized. “No. Not yet.”

My eyes flew open. I tried to move, too, my entire body tensing, but Saul’s arm tightened under my head. He was haggard and damp with rain, and the blood on his face made every part of me cold with fear.

“Relax,” he said, gently but firmly. “Just settle down for a second, okay?”

“Galina—” I began.

“She’s okay. Mad as hell, but okay. We’re going to have to have a talk, Jillian.”

I stared at him. There was crusted stuff in my eyes. I blinked. Lightning spattered through the clouds. The stadium’s roof was a gigantic gaping hole. The whole place was peppered with huge chunks of concrete, as if the gods of urban architecture had decided to throw up over everything.

Monty is just going to have a fit. It was a good thought, a sane thought. It meant I was alive. Saul’s mouth was drawn tight, and he looked fine. Bloody, but fine.

“You are never doing that to me again,” he informed me. “I swear, Jill. If you even try I’ll…” He ran out of words, his irises flaring with orange as the cougar came close to the surface. It retreated, and the rumble in his chest was a growl.

My lips were cracked. My mouth tasted foul. But I managed to get the words out, only slurring them a little. “Nothing. Could be worse. Than losing. You.”

A flash of pain crossed his face, and it tore at my heart. I never wanted to hurt him. But he simply leaned forward, his other arm slipping around me as well, and pulled me close. We clung to each other, one bone-thin Were and a very tired hunter, and if there were tears on my cheeks nobody saw and I didn’t care.

He was alive. So was I.

It had to be enough.

We didn’t get to stay like that, though. “Jill?” Anya Devi, softly.

Saul’s arms loosened. I found I could move. “Jesus,” I moaned, and someone laughed.

“Always did know how to throw a party, darlin’.” Leon’s Texas drawl was thick as cream. He must’ve been tired. “Nice friends you got. Where you find them?”

“Oh, shut up.” Anya sighed. “Jill. Please.”

I got my legs working again. Saul helped. He hauled me up carefully, I still weighed more than I should. Denser muscle, denser bone, the gem sparking on my wrist, humming a low note of satisfaction. My skin crawled. I was covered in guck and goop and I stank to high heaven.

Everything stank. The not-grass was dying, lashed by cold water. The altar was crushed under a huge shipwreck-shape of concrete, a charred stick jetting up from its crest. After a second I realized it was a flagpole, and the char-tattered rags hanging from it were anonymous. The hellbreed and Traders were either dead or fled, but there were bodies everywhere. Mounds of corpses, and grim-faced Weres picking through them, looking for survivors.

Or looking for their kin, or for hunters.

“Did we…” I steadied myself against Saul’s shoulder. Did we lose anyone? I couldn’t say it.

“Some. Maybe.” Anya was wet clear through, leaning on Theron. The Werepanther looked somber, but Devi just looked tired. “We’ll deal with that in a bit. There’s…something you should see.”

Oh, Christ, what now? But I squared myself, wearily, and found I could stand. Not very steadily, but I could at least hold myself upright. I could even fight, if I had to.

Except what was left to kill?

I had a sneaking suspicion I was about to find out.

The Lance lay near the altar, twisted like the flagpole, quivering a subaudible hum of distress and frustrated anger. It was weak, very weak. All the force it had accumulated was now spent, and all it could do was shake like a whipped dog.

Dog. “Gilberto?” I whispered. “And the…the dog?”

“Gil’s fine.” Anya pointed. “See?”

My apprentice was bandaging Benny Cross’s leg. Half of Gil’s hair was singed off, Benny was covered in all kinds of crap, and the dogsbody slumped next to Gilberto, hanging its narrow head. It glanced at me, ears pricking, but it looked as tired as Anya. As tired as I felt.

Thank you. I didn’t even know who I was thanking. “Good deal,” I rasped. “Okay. What’s next? Point me at it. I’ll kill it.”

“Good.” Devi shook herself away from Theron with a quick glance of thanks. “Because it’s Perry. Sort of. And if you don’t ventilate that fucker, I just might.”

40

At the northern edge of the battlefield, a few of the winged things had gathered. The rain avoided them.

They didn’t turn as Anya and I approached, Saul and Theron hanging back with perfect Were tact. A few other hunters—Dmitri Roslan, Jack Quint, a short, hard-faced woman I realized was Belle de Sud herself, with her long brown fingers flicking uneasily at her whip handle, four or five others—stood in a loose semicircle, watching. Dmitri flicked me a salute, his usual grin absent; I returned it without thinking.

I couldn’t help it. I stared at the wings. They were all white, some with flecks of brown. And huge, managing to look perfectly natural instead of a violation of biology. The clarity had faded to a slow gleam around them, no longer hurtfully bright. They faced something chained to the goalpost, glints of gold shifting as the blackened, charred thing moved slightly. A ripple of tension went through the winged, as if they expected him to break the thin golden bonds and start making trouble again.

Bitterness filled my mouth. Anya tapped at a gun butt, her face set.

The tallest of them half-turned as I halted next to him. It was Michael the Caretaker, and there was no shadow of scarring left on his face. His wings drooped a little, as if he was tired, too. His eyes were the same, though, bright and mild, that shadow of pain sending an answering twinge through me.

“You understand,” he said, quiet.

I don’t understand this at all. “Yes,” I heard myself say, dully, a good pupil aiming to please. “Sacrifice.”

Michael nodded. “You were willing, again, even when there was no hope. That creates a…new thing, you could say, in the Pattern.” He looked back at the charred form, and his shoulders dropped again. “His father is dead. He is utterly flesh now, as he wished to be.” A world of sadness in the words. “The choice is yours, to spare or to kill.”

I didn’t want to think about that yet. “Where’s Mikhail?” My hands were fists. “I saw him. He was here. Where is he?”

Michael shrugged. One wing flicked, delicately, sending a clean breeze over my filthy cheeks. “Only the ones present are here.”

“Well, no shit.” Sarcasm gave me fresh strength. The gem muttered, etheric force trickling back through me. I needed food, and rest, and maybe a couple pints of something eye-wateringly alcoholic before I’d be anything close to my mettle, but right at the moment I didn’t care. I was shaking.

But not with the weakness. No.

With rage.

He turned, this time facing me fully. “Love cannot be forced. Love is only given, freely.” A faint smile, but he didn’t look happy. Instead, it was that sorrow again. “Love is only proved, though it asks no proof in return. This is important, but it is not our task here. We are to witness your choice.” Again a wing dipped, indicating the blackened body, and I was forgetting I’d ever seen him without the snowy feathered expanses.

My fists ached. “What were you doing down there in the Hill’s boiler room all this time, huh? Just waiting for this?”

“Witnessing.” He nodded slightly, as if the question was expected, weighed his answer, and added more. “Serving the Pattern.”

“Your Pattern fucking blows.” It wasn’t up to my usual standards. I sounded more like Gilberto than myself. “It’s insane. It hurts good people. It’s not fair.”

“It is,” he said gravely, “all we have.”

He made a sudden movement, and another ripple went through the winged things. But he’d just unlimbered his sword from somewhere. It was a heavy broadsword piece of work, too tall for me, with wicked finials on the guard and a ruby the size of a fist at the end of the pommel. It looked razor sharp, and its bright blade smoked with dappled light.

It looked a little like the sunsword. Well, the sunsword was a toothpick compared to this, but still, you could see an echo.

He presented me with the hilt. Anya breathed an obscenity.

“It is your choice,” Michael repeated.

It was hard work to shake my right hand out. Even harder to touch the damn thing. Warm strength poured down my arm from the cool metal, and Michael nodded approvingly.

I probably looked ridiculous, stepping across the sludge-dying not-grass, gingerly and awkwardly holding a broadsword almost as long as I was tall away from me. The winged stepped back in unison, but the hunters moved forward, almost as if prearranged.

Is this part of his fucking Pattern too? The bitterness was all through me.

He’d been burned, terribly. Weeping cracks coated his charred flesh, but his eyes were still the same sterile blue. The dome of his skull without any hair to cover it was subtly wrong, and he seemed smaller. Of course, anyone’s going to look small covered in fourth-degree burns and chained to a goalpost, right?

Even a hellbreed.

His lips cracked. Thick colorless fluid wept from them. “Kissssssss.” Sighing, like a lover.

“Hyperion. Perry.” I swallowed hard. My palms might have been sweating, or it might have been the rain or the filth making the hilt slippery. The sword hummed, a thunderbolt contained. His own black blade lay in pieces around him, and Perry raised his burned-bared head and stared at me. “Or should I say, Argoth.”

A shrug. More blackened skin broke, a brittle sugar-glaze. How he was still alive? “Only a part of him. A fragment. Insurance, originally. A doppelgänger, meant to be a placeholder here, in case the masters needed hands in this world.”

It was my turn to nod slightly. “But you wanted more. Slipped the leash, made a deal with Jack Karma, and got the original locked away in Hell. Then you started planning how to get all of the original’s power, all the other pieces of him.” I coughed, tasted smoke. Thunder roiled in the distance, and the rain intensified. “But for that, you needed a hunter. Because you didn’t just want all of your father. You wanted to be real. Anything above an arkeus isn’t usually physical, it can be disrupted and once it is, goodbye and good night. The bargain with Karma and his line kept you here and gave you a simulacrum of flesh, and you could afford to settle down and wait for a hunter who could take on your poppa and keep you bolted to the physical world at the same time.” You followed Mikhail all the way from Europe. That’s almost why he drew on you in the Monde that first time I saw you. Did he think he was free of you? Not likely. So what was he thinking?

Would I ever know?

His tongue flickered, startling cherry-red. He studied me for a long time, and I let him. The sword quivered heavily, but my arm wasn’t tired. It was building in me, the knowledge of what I had to do.

“I am flesh now,” he finally hissed. “Flesh, my darling one. You made it possible. You killed the original, as you so quaintly call him. I am his heir, and we are linked. I am your other half. We’re the same coin, my love.”

Negation rose inside me. But I nodded again, slowly. He was at least partly right. I’d been mortgaging bits of myself to Perry for years, telling myself it didn’t make me a Trader. It gave me the strength to police the nightside more effectively, and his mark on me had been the punishment I deserved.

For everything.

No. I couldn’t afford to lie here. He was right. There was only a thread-thin edge between Perry and me. A coin’s edge. He had waited for me for a very long time. Waited for the hunter who was, at bottom, like him.

We are the ones crying in the dark, and on our backs they build golden cities.

God help me, I understood.

“So what is it to be?” More of his brittle skin cracking as he shifted. The thin golden chains sent up threads of steam, whisked away by the cold wet breeze. “Cut me loose, and take your place as my keeper? Think of what you can do, with me your willing slave. Think of the battles you can win.” Another wriggling motion.

He might eventually squirm free, I realized. But it didn’t seem important.

“Or strike me down with that avenging sword—overcompensating a bit, aren’t we? And damn yourself with murdering the helpless, whose only crime was to wait for you and love you?” Those white teeth were now grimed with thin pinkish fluid, darker lines accumulating between them. He writhed again. “I waited so, so long for you, my dove. Theirs is not the only Pattern.”

There. That’s what he’s after. “No,” I dimly heard myself say, through the roaring in my ears. “I suppose it isn’t.”

“We can make a new one,” he whispered. “Just you and me. A fair one. You can mete out justice, and I will make it total. Just let me loose.”

I stepped closer, boots squishing in the muck. “I suppose it isn’t the only pattern.” Louder now, clear and strong. “It’s not even the one that matters.”

Perry gazed up at me. “Let me free.” So soft, all the promise in the world. “You will never be lonely, Kiss. Not so long as I am able to comfort you.”

Oh, God. The problem wasn’t that he said it.

The problem was that it was true. There was only a hairsbreadth of difference between Perry…and me. Or at least, the part of me that made sure I survived. The stranger who lived inside me, strong and ruthless where I was weak. And with him dead, I would be—down in the secret place where the animal of survival crouches, the part of me that was coldly determined to do what had to be done—alone.

Utterly alone.

The sword rose, thrumming, its blade suddenly pouring with white radiance. Perry bared his teeth, more skin crackling, and the golden chain burst with a tinkle. My right wrist flamed with cramping pain, but I brought the blade down with a scream. It cut, the goalpost singing before it groaned and tipped, smashing into the wet ground with a plorch.

Lifted and flung, my right arm on fire, torn out by the roots, every nerve screaming…and I landed, hard, my fingers forced open and the sword clattering away. Rustling filled the broken bowl of the stadium, and they took wing, spiraling up with a grace and authority that forced a dry barking sob from my aching, parched throat.

The last one bent over me, blue eyes dark with sorrow. But he was smiling, and he laid one warm finger to my lips. Warmth broke over me in a wave, white light filling my head for one long glorious moment.

Well done, he whispered. Or maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe I just thought he did. Maybe I needed someone to say it.

In any case, there was a pop of collapsing air, and he vanished.

I lay there in the rain, fresh cold sludge working up through my hair and the tatters of my coat, with my right arm flung up as if to protect me.

My whole, naked, unmarked right arm.

41

We had Galina to thank. Pissing off a Sanctuary by attempting to burn down her house from the outside is not a good idea, and she’d done something Sancs only keep for emergencies—somehow opening a space down in her vaults for hunters to step through from other Sanctuaries. They’d been flooding into Santa Luz ever since I’d made that frantic phone call to Anya Devi, and with them working from the top and other hunters working from the bottom, as well as Galina’s control over the wrecked physical structure of her house, they’d broken through before dusk.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out something big was going down, either. With the sky going dark and hellbreed and Traders popping up everywhere and making for the stadium, you only had to have half a brain in your head to figure out where the big event was going down.

Montaigne was moaning about property damage. Anya filled out the reams of paperwork for a Major Paranormal Incident so we could get government funding. Flash floods had claimed a couple lives, whole sections of the barrio were burned down, the morgue was groaning at the seams from the citywide spree of murder, arson, and other hellbreed fun. Most of the other hunters had only stayed to help deal with the cleanup in the stadium—banefire and yellow tape, just to be sure, and the Lance reduced to cold, metallic ash scraped into an alabaster jar—and headed back to their cities.

We’re not much on goodbyes. So mostly they just slid out of town after exchanging a few words with me or Devi.

A few stayed. We’d lost four hunters and six Weres. One of the Weres was Rahel, and, oddly enough, that was the thing I cried over, hunched next to Saul’s bed with my face in my knees, snot slicking my upper lip as I shook and sobbed as quietly as possible. I bit the smooth, unmarked skin on my right wrist where a scar in the shape of a pair of lips had been pressed, where the gem had shivered free of my flesh. I was still stronger and faster than even the average hunter, but there was no mark on me.

It’s not even the only pattern that matters.

A bunch of ’breed had escaped through the hellmouth. Things were going to be hopping all over—but at least we’d staved off the big catastrophe. Argoth was no more, and there hadn’t been any other prepared hellmouths.

Just the one. Just Perry’s lunge toward fleshly incarnation. With me as his linchpin and Argoth’s power behind him, what would he have been able to do?

What wouldn’t he have done?

Galina’s house and shop were fully rebuilt in a matter of eighteen hours, growing up from the ground like a mushroom. You can’t keep a Sanc down for long; even if Perry had succeeded in locking her temporarily inside her vault and making her mad. She stalked around muttering for a while, checking every inch of her house and making tiny adjustments while the walls shivered with redgold sheets of cascading energy.

We all stayed out of her way, except for Theron.

The dogsbody had vanished. One moment it was there at the stadium, the next…gone. I didn’t mention it to Devi.

Gilberto was in the barrio with some other hunter apprentices and Leon Budge, helping the Weres rebuild. Mickey’s on Mayfair had gone down in a three-alarm fire—more hellbreed work—but they would rebuild.

Saul slept through most of it, but every time he woke up I was at his bedside. Devi handled the rest. It was one more thing to thank her for. Every time I tried, though, she just rolled her eyes and waved an absinthe bottle at me, threatening to make me drink until I shut up.

I shut up.

When Saul woke, he ate. I carried tray after tray of food up the stairs, watched him fill out bit by bit, listened to his breathing.

I did not think about Perry. Or about wings. I didn’t sleep much, either. Maybe I was afraid of dreaming.

Hello? I asked the silence inside my chest. Who am I? Tell me who I am now.

There was no answer.

Anya tapped on the door one long, drowsy-sunny afternoon. Saul was sleeping deeply on his side, his hair streaked with tawny lights. I held a finger to my lips and tiptoed to the door. Left it open a crack so I could hear him.

“You can take the truck,” Devi said bluntly, her bindi glimmering. She pushed a bead-weighted strand of hair behind her ear. “Get out, get away, get your head cleared out. There’s nothing you can do here.”

I slumped against the wall, one hand on a knife hilt. She was tense, I realized, and I left my fingers fall away. “I’m a liability.” Flatly, daring her to disagree.

“You need a vacation,” she corrected. “You’ve done enough for a while, and if you keep pushing you’re going to kill yourself. Or Saul. Or both, and I don’t want to deal with that.”

I moved, restless. Looked at the floor. Our boots were placed just so, both of us braced and ready for action.

“Mikhail,” I said finally. “He was there.”

Her chin dipped a fraction, the scar down her right cheek flushing. “Maybe he was. I’m not going to fucking disagree. I’m not even going to speculate who or what those bird-things were. Nobody is.”

At least, not out loud. Well, thank God for that. But I shivered. “One thing.”

“Okay.” She didn’t even ask what. Just agreed.

My heart twisted, I pushed down the pressure in my throat. “The Monde.” My throat was so dry. It was work to get the sounds out. “Burn it. Banefire. Please.”

“Of course. Jill.” Her hand on my arm, brutally short fingernails digging in. Her duster made a sound, but my arms were bare; I wore only a T-shirt and a pair of spare leather pants. “Perry’s dead. Absolutely dead. He’s not coming back.”

You promise? Because I wouldn’t put it past him. But she was a hunter, and I looked up. We held each other’s gaze for a long time, possibly an eternity. And I found out, gratefully, that I couldn’t lie to a fellow hunter.

“I’m afraid either way, Devi,” I whispered.

She nodded. There was nothing else to say, so she didn’t bother. She just let me fold forward until my head was on her shoulder, and the silent sobbing that shook me was like an earthquake. She stroked my hair, touching the sharp-spined charms he’d given me, and they didn’t bite either of us.