It was going to have to be enough.
Naked light bulbs swung at the end of cords, crazy-dappling shadows over the warehouse’s interior. The whip lashed, and flayed the primrose-eyed hellbreed’s face. It cut him off mid-chuckle, and if I wanted him dead now would have been the time to shoot him.
But I didn’t. Instead, I shot the Trader springing at me in midair, and to my right, the one who had somehow cottoned on that I wasn’t down and out yet. He’d swapped some of his humanity for superstrength and superspeed, but my aim was true and half his hell-trading head evaporated. That took the pep out of him, bigtime.
Lucky shot. I was just lucky all over tonight.
The screaming started, and from there it was straightforward. My next shot took out one of the hellbreed ringmaster’s bending-backward little knees. He had folded down and was screaming, the black ichor that passes for their blood bubbling out past the thin fingers clasping his face. Said face was now a mess of hamburger and there were three more Traders to deal with.
I hadn’t thought they’d be stupid enough to stay at their last known hangout. Not when they knew I was after them. I hadn’t precisely made a mistake — I’d just thought about questioning them before I started killing.
Mikhail would have told me not to bother. But he wasn’t here. Twenty-nine days since the Weres lit his pyre and his soul rode the smoke to Valhalla.
I was on my own.
Four minutes later the last Trader died gibbering at the end of a long smear of black-tinted blood, the corruption eating up his tissues and making the body do a St. Vitus’s dance. The pacts Traders make claim more than the soul, and maybe they would think twice about mortgaging themselves if they could see what happens when one of them bites it.
I don’t know. All I see are the ones who chance it.
I turned back to the hellbreed. He wasn’t so pretty now, and I hoped I’d gotten one of his eyes, popped it like a bubble. The whip coiled neatly and stowed itself, habitual movements while I kept the blubbering hellbreed covered. I ached all over and my ribs twitched, bone resetting itself. The scar pulse-burned on my right wrist, sawing against the nerves of my arm.
Slow and easy here, Jill.
My smart eye was hot and dry, watching the plucking under the fabric of the surface of the world. He could really be that hurt, burbling and moaning into his hands. But the tension in his shoulders — clad in once-elegant navy Brooks Brothers, now spattered with blood and other fluids — told me otherwise. His suit coat flopped around a little, low on his right side where the first bullet had taken a chunk out of him. Black ichor dripped and the noises he was making were straight out of a nightmare.
“Cut it out.” My voice sliced through his. The silver charms tied in my hair rattled and buzzed, blessed metal reacting against the contamination in the air. “You’re not that hurt.”
“Bitch,” he blubbered into his hands. “Oh you bitch.”
You’d think they’d find something more original to call a female hunter. I kept the gun on him, every muscle quivering-alert. The scar burned, working into my flesh. “You can guess what I’m after.” Each word very carefully weighted. “Slade. A hunter. Taller than me. Black hair, silver charms. Disappeared about twelve hours ago.”
“Bitch,” he moaned again.
I didn’t have time. So I blew away his other knee. The report boomed and caromed through the warehouse’s interior, and he crawfished on the floor, whisper-screaming because he’d run out of air.
“You have arms, too,” I reminded him. “Shoulders. Ribs. Genitalia. Start talking.”
In the end it took one of his elbows, too. By then the Traders were smears of bubbling black, corruption eating at their tissues, and the primrose-eyed ‘breed screamed until I put him out of his misery. Silence descended through the foul reek.
I swallowed hard, set my jaw, and took just enough time to clean the contamination of hellbreed away with whispering blue banefire, shaken off my fingers like oil, before I got going. I didn’t even stop to wash the blood off my face.
When another hunter calls, you go. It’s that simple. We who hold back the tide of Hell don’t ask for help lightly. I had irons in the fire back home, but Slade had called. A short message— Trouble brewing. Something big. Need backup. And I was on a plane and out of my town before the sun rose, ending up in his territory over a thousand miles away. Where the skies were always gray and there was a coffee shop on every single corner. The whole city smelled like concrete and old, moldy java.
I didn’t have a chance to ask why he’d called me, since he’d disappeared before I could get here.
We’d done hunter residencies together in New Orleans with Katja Lefevre, and that had been one sliptilting screamfest after another. I still had scars twitching from those six months. But you don’t ask questions. A hunter won’t call another away from her territory without a damn good reason.
His house on its quiet tree-lined street was empty, the front door smashed to flinders and Slade himself gone. The local Weres, Slade’s backup, knew nothing. The hellbreed weren’t opening their mouths much. All I had was a name — Narcisa. And another one: the Dutch.
I didn’t know what Narcisa meant. But the Dutch was a hellbreed club downtown, near the open air market where they threw fish around during the day.
I was glad to miss that. I mean, come on. Flinging fish?
The skyline here was alien territory. Santa Luz is desert, but Slade’s city lives under a perpetual gray drizzle. You wouldn’t think it would make much difference to a nocturnal creature. Dark is dark, and it gets cold in the desert too.
I crouched on the rooftop, dripping hair, dripping from my nose and fingertips, my leather trench shedding water thanks to the waterproofing. Weather means very little to a full-fledged hunter, but the chill in this place reached right into my bones.
It wasn’t physical.
Across the street, the neon sign for the Dutch — a flying ship, of all things, with both oars and sail, lovingly rendered in glowing tubes — cast sickly green and red glow down into the wet street. Music pulsed in bass-thumping ribbons inside, the double doors flung wide in invitation. There was a line going down the block, but nobody seemed to have umbrellas. Just standing there in the wet.
No Traders in the line — they walked right in past the Trader bouncers. No visible hellbreed, but they would be inside.
They usually are. Ready and waiting, like spiders in a web.
Back in Santa Luz it was an hour ahead but a world away. Dark falls quickly out in the desert, like a guillotine blade. I would have hit the streets as dusk did, and probably already been in one or two short sharp fights. Since Mikhail was dead, plenty of them thought I’d be easy to get past or roll over.
Don’t think about that, Jill. Focus.
I eased my weight back and forth, watching. A hunter learns early to draw a cloak of silence over the waiting, an uncanny stillness. Within that circle of quiet, though, you have to move a little bit. Shifting and adjusting to keep the muscles primed for action.
And as usual while I was waiting, the memories came back. My teacher’s final gurgle as the scarlet gush of his life left him, his body stiffening then slumping in my arms, becoming deadweight. The bitch who killed him was gone, good luck finding her now. And here I was a thousand miles from my city on a wild goose chase, and God only knew what was going on at home —
Stop. Intuition tingled. Look, Jill. Something’s there.