Dead Man Rising

Chapter Two

Morning had leapt gray into drizzling afternoon when I knocked on the wooden door, the street behind me gathering circles of orange light under each streetlamp. A glowing-red neon sign in the front window—a real antique—buzzed like hovertraffic without the rattling whine, its reflection cast on the bank of yarrow below. I felt wrung-out and a little sore, as usual after a bounty, and the blood on my clothes, with its simmering stink of decaying spicy fruit, didn't help.

The door was painted red, and the shields over this small brick house with its cheerful ragged garden were tight and well-woven. Kalifor poppies vied with mugwort and feverfew, nasturtium and foxglove; there were some late bloomers, but mostly the plants were now merely green or dying back, getting ready for the rainy chill of winter. I smelled the sharpness of rosemary, she must have just harvested her sage too. In summer the garden was a riot of color, the property-line shields smooth and carefully woven, an obvious stronghold. Then again, I'd heard Sierra never left her house. I'd never seen or heard of her around town, and I didn't care either.

No, I came here for a different reason. I blinked against the gray sunlight, wished it was darker. Like most psions, I never feel quite myself during the day; a marker for nocturnalism crops up with amazing regularity in psion gene profiles. When darkness falls is when I feel most alive. At least that hadn't changed, even if everything else about me had.

I was glad I was back in time. I'd missed my appointment last month and been a little out of sorts ever since. I lifted my hand to knock at the door but the house shields had already flushed a warm, welcoming rose color, and the door pulled open. I pushed back a few stray strands of my damp hair and met Sierra Ignatius's eyes.

Her gaze was wide and pale blue, irises fading into the whites, the pupils sometimes flaring randomly. There was an odd film over her eyes; the sign of congenital blindness. Usually blindness is fixed with gene therapy during infancy, but for some reason she hadn't received the therapy then or in later years. Despite that, she moved around her little brick home with an accuracy and assurance some sighted people never achieve. Rumor had it that her parents had been Ludders, but I wasn't curious enough to find out. Her blindness made her, like me, an anomaly; it was probably why I allowed myself to come here.

"Danny!" She sounded calmly delighted, a short thin woman with thistledown hair and a thorn-laden cruciform tat on her left cheek. My cheek burned, my tat shifting. I felt another unwilling smile tug the corners of my mouth up. Sierra looked like a tiny pixie full of mischief, and her aura smelled of roses and wood ash, a clean human smell I somehow didn't mind as much as others. "I wondered if you'd come back. You missed last month."

Behind Sierra, taking her hand off the hilt of her short-sword, was a rangy female Shaman with the kind of tensile grace that shouted combat training and a tat that matched Sierra's. She inclined her chin gracefully, turned on her heel, and stamped away. Kore didn't like me, and the feeling was mutual. We'd tangled over a bounty once, one of her Skinlin friends I'd hauled in for murder and illegal genesplicing. She didn't hold a grudge but she didn't have to like me either, and whenever I showed up for my appointment, Kore took herself upstairs out of the way. I appreciated her restraint.

I would have hated to kill her.

"Sorry I missed last month." I stepped inside, took a deep lungful of kyphii incense and the smell of dried lavender. The air was still and close, and as soon as Sierra closed the outside world out I felt my shoulders relax fractionally. Her front hall was low and dim, candles burning in a niche under a statue of Aesclepius. The walls were wood paneling and the floor mellow hardwood. "I was out on a bounty."

"You've been out on a bounty since I've met you, sweetie. Come on back, the table's set up. What's hurting you today?" She was, as usual, all business, setting off past me with a confident step, faster than I could have gone with my eyes closed. I saw her aura fringing, sending out little fingers of awareness, the perfume of spiced Power trailed behind her, reminding me of Jace. We walked down the hall, through the neat little kitchen with its racks of potted herbs in the window and the suncatcher above lazily hanging on a string. Her counters were clean and the kitchen table clear except for two wine-red place-mats and a vase of white lilies that sent a shiver up my spine. There were few flowers I could see anymore without thinking of Santino.

"Hurting me?" As usual, I pretended to give the question my full attention as she led me into the round room at the back of the house, where a fountain of piled black stones dripped. She stepped down onto the plush carpet and moved into the middle of the room where the table sat, draped with fresh white sheets. Hurting me? Nothing, really. Only my shoulder. My hand. My heart. "Not much. I feel pretty okay."

"Liar. All right." She smoothed the sheets, a habitual movement. "What do you want me to work on?"

I shrugged, remembered she couldn't see the motion. Slid out of my coat, hung it up on the peg by the door, and undid my rig with the clumsy fingers of my right hand. "My back, whatever else. Like usual. Just work your magic, that's all."

Sierra cocked her pale pixie head, listening as I hung my bag and my rig up. "Cordite," she noted mildly. "And I can smell that sweet stuff. You got clipped?"

I found myself smiling again. I could remember going months without smiling, before Rio. "You're amazing. Yeah, I'm a little dirty. Sorry." I leaned down, working my boots off with my right hand, then padded to the table in my sock feet. "Do you mind?"

If I had still been fully human, I would have had to chemwash to get the blood of. As it was, only my clothes were bloody; my skin had absorbed the thick black ichor. She, like all psions, could see the staining of black-diamond fire in my aura, marking me as something close to demon; she never asked me to chemwash, figuring whatever communicable nasties I had weren't dangerous to her. It was open wounds she had to watch out for, and I didn't have any of those.

Not on the outside, anyway.

"Of course not. Your back, you said. What about that left shoulder of yours?"

I reached up with my right hand, touched my shirt over the mark. "Leave that alone for right now." It was the standard answer, and as usual, she accepted it gracefully.

I stripped down, left my clothes on the straight-backed chair set to the side, and eased myself onto the thigh-high table, squirming onto my belly while Sierra pulled the sheet up over me. I'd told her she didn't have to leave while I disrobed, most psions are pretty comfortable with nakedness. I wasn't precisely uncomfortable, but taking her up on her offer to give me privacy while I undressed seemed weak. I fitted my face into the facecradle, seeing the carpet below me in the flickering wash of candlelight and my braid swinging to the side, and let out an involuntary sigh.

"I live for that sound." She folded the sheet down low on my hips. The bolster went underneath my ankles to take the stress off my lower back, and I sighed again. "Ooh, twice. Must have been a hard month."

"Yeah. Couple of bounties." I closed my eyes as she rubbed her hands together, heating them up, the warm good smell of almond oil blooming. She didn't scent the oil, for which I was grateful.

"Always working." She laid her hands flat on my back, one right between my shoulder blades, the other at the base of my spine. A few moments of pressure, then she rocked me back and forth a little, gauging the way my body mass responded. "Too tense, Danny. When are you going to learn to loosen up?"

"Perfectly flexible," I muttered. "Got to work to pay you, sweets."

It wasn't true, I had enough money now. I had all the money I could ever want. I didn't need the bounty fees. But oh, gods, I did need the bounties.

She moved to the head of the table. Then what I'd been waiting for… she leaned in and smoothed both her hands down on either side of my spine, digging into my muscles under the tough, perfect golden skin. I let out another sigh. Her hands were cool and forgiving, my skin warmer than hers because of the hiked metabolism. I shivered with delight as she started the usual routine, kneading at me. My right hand relaxed and dangled off the table as I let go, fraction by fraction, Sierra's hands seeking out knots and nodes of tension.

Gabe had bought me my initial consultation with Sierra, and I'd thought it a frivolous gift even after she bullied and dragged me to the red-painted door at the appointed time. The first two-hour massage had ended with me in a languid puddle, more relaxed than I could ever remember. I'd gone home whistling, arrived at my door in the closest thing to a good mood I'd had since before Rio, and promptly burst into tears on my way upstairs. Thank the gods Jace had been out shopping for groceries. I'd locked myself in the bathroom and had a completely uncharacteristic fit of sobbing, then took a long hot shower. As dawn had risen through my bedroom window, I had fallen asleep for the first time in weeks, a thin restless troubled sleep but sleep nonetheless.

That did it, I was booked. I came back once a month unless I was on a bounty, and each time it was the same: her delicate iron fingers digging into me, smoothing me out. Hers was a touch I didn't have to fend off or worry about what it cost me. I paid her, she touched me, it was that simple. Even and uncomplicated.

Why couldn't everything be like that?

"Are you staying in town long?" Her voice was soft, if I chose not to talk she would be silent.

"A while. Don't know when the next bounty's coming up." I felt the involuntary quiver go through me. She must have, too, because her touch gentled.

"Too much pressure?"

You couldn't hurt me if you tried, Shaman. At least, not without steel or a plasgun and a whole lot of luck. "No. Not too much." I wish I knew exactly what I was. I wish Japhrimel would have had time to tell me.

There I was again, thinking about him. I let out a long soft breath, keeping my eyes closed. "Just thinking," I explained, grudgingly.

"About?" Again, the soft tone; if I parried the question she'd let it drop.

About a demon. About a Fallen demon, a dead demon, that I only knew for a short time but I can't stop thinking about. He won't leave me alone. And neither will the only other man I ever loved, the one that betrayed me so honorably. A ghost I can't have and a man I can't touch, and skipping from bounty to bounty isn't helping any. "About the past."

A soft laugh. She kept working at my back, smoothing down the muscles, moving to one side or the other and using her elbow or the flat of her forearm, her entire weight pressing down through tough skin. "Never a comfortable subject."

That's the understatement of the year, sunshine. "No." I shifted in the facecradle a little, the emerald grafted into my cheek digging into my flesh. She moved to my legs, flipping the sheet aside, and I swallowed dryly.

"You have great skin." Tactful of her to change the subject. The spicy smell of kyphii was stronger now, reminding me of Gabe's house. Gabe loved burning that stuff. "Lucky girl."

"Mh." A noncommittal sound in reply. She took the hint and the rest of the massage was spent in blissful silence on her side and increasingly ill-tempered brooding on mine.

It was the bounties that were bothering me, I tried to tell myself. Jace was beginning to look a little ragged. Ten bounties in under six months, none of them cakewalks, and he hadn't uttered a word of protest. Not only that, but he'd insisted on coming along, and I'd caved each time. Allowing it, expecting it, treating him as if it was the old days when he had taught me how to track, how to let my intuition do the work for me, how to find a mark and stick on him, how to scent the prey and become the thing you hunted, how to find clients that would pay for things other than a legitimate tag but short of actual murder.

Admit it, Danny. You don't want to let him out of your sight. You're afraid he'll vanish and never come back, or that you'll come back to an empty house.

It was uncomfortably close to the truth. The fact that Jace never asked about Japhrimel only made it easier to pretend nothing was happening, that we were just living together. Just roommates with a good thing going, a lucrative bounty-hunting partnership and a carefully charted dance where he moved forward and I retreated, but never fast or far enough.

Was he waiting for me to forget Japhrimel?

It was only a few days, Danny. And he was a demon. He lied to you about Doreen's daughter, about Santino, about Lucifer's plans. What is it with the men I fall for and their aversion to truth?

"Time to turn over," Sierra said softly, and I did while she held the sheet; then she slipped the bolster under my knees and started working on the front of my legs. The sound of water from the fountain in the corner soothed me, just like the smell of kyphii and Sierra's strong fingers. She knew just where the aches were. What I would have given to know about this when I was human. But when I was human I never would have let anyone do this to me, even if I was paying them and thus absolving myself of obligation.

She even massaged my abdomen but left my shoulder alone, and I didn't glance down to see the fluid glyph in its pretty scarred lines, looking more like a decoration than a brand, the mark of a demon. Is it his Name? I wondered, not for the first time. Or is it "best opened by this date"? Lucifer put it on me, like Nichtvren mark their thralls. Maybe it's like a brand. A swift spill of feeling roiled through my stomach, revulsion and heat all mixed into one pretty package. Japhrimel's mouth on mine, his skin against mine, the semaphore of desire that needed no translation… My rings flashed, went back to swirling lazily; my aura rang with the twisted black-diamond flames of demon and the sparkles that meant Necromance. I looked like nothing else in the landscape of Power now.

The massage ended with Sierra taking my hair out of its braid and rubbing my scalp. I had never known what kind of tension lurked in the thin tendons and flat muscles over the cranium. It was unreal. By far my most favorite moment of the massage was when she undid my braid; it was like having Doreen play with my hair again.

Doreen. It was turning out to be a day of unpleasant memories all around. I wished Trina at the agency would call in with the news that she'd scouted me another bounty. There had to be a job out there that would keep me going so fast I didn't have time to slow down and brood.

And remember. Memory, rage, guilt. The holy trinity, as far as I was concerned. Good fuel, channeled into bounties and justice. Hadn't I ever felt something softer?

Well, we could add shame to the list, couldn't we? My shame, that I was still grieving for a dead demon I hadn't known more than a few days, who had augmented me into something even my best friends had a hard time looking at.

I sighed as Sierra's fingers trailed through my hair, regretfully. "Better?" she asked.

"Much." I made a mental note to tip her 40 percent this time. I opened my eyes, my left hand curling as if seeking a slim sheathed shape. It was a reflex, as if I hadn't just spent almost a year without a sword. My right hand wasn't cramping either. It had straightened out, the fingers relaxed. The mark lay cold and quiescent against the hollow of my shoulder. "Thanks, Sierra."

"No problem. Want some tea, or would you like to let yourself out?"

So tactful. "I'd better let myself out. Thanks."

"You're very welcome, Danny. See you next month." She retreated, trailing the spiky spicy smell of Shaman and the decaying smell of human with her. I took another deep lungful of kyphii and exhaled into the dark air, staring at the white-painted ceiling. The door closed softly behind her, and I rested there against the table for a moment.

See if Trina can find another quick job. Just one more, I told myself. Then it might be time for a vacation. Close up and magseal the house, go to the islands or something. Start chasing down more Magi shadowjournals and break their codes, see if any of them know what you are. Maybe even see if there's a Magi circle that will apprentice you, even if you are too old. Your initial training's sound, you're not rusty, and who knows how long you'll live now? Demons are virtually immortal unless killed by violence or suicide. Who knows how long I'll be around?

I hated that thought It usually waited until the middle of the day while I was trying to sleep, to show up.

All right, Valentine. Get your ass in gear, you need to go home and change. I surged up off the table, taking the sheet with me, was dressed in five minutes and fully-armed in another five. I would let myself out the back door and through the back gate, up to Ninth, cut through the University District to stretch my legs while I did some thinking. I thought best while moving, and that would get me home in time to get some serious trash holovid-viewing in. I tapped my datband, paying Sierra's fee and tacking percent on for a tip; I'd have Trina schedule me another appointment next month.

Outside, the afternoon was wet and fragrant, the smells of Sierra's garden temporarily overwhelming the drowsing stink of Saint City air. I glanced up at the sky, scanned my surroundings out of habit, and felt my shoulders come up under the habitual burden of tension as I stepped back into my life.