Dante Valentine

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Yeah. Lucky, lucky me.

  My skin tingled as we stood there, Jace leaning on his staff—rescued from the hotel room in Jersey—with its raffia twine at the top, small bones clicking and shifting against one another, even though the staff wasn’t moving. After a while a Shaman’s staff tends to take on a personality of its own, much like any object used to contain Power. There are even stories of Shamans who have passed their staves on to students or children, mostly in the older traditions. Jace was an Eclectic, like most North Merican Shamans; it’s hard to work for the Hegemony and only stick with one discipline. Plus, psions tend to be magpies. We pick up a little of this, a little of that, whatever works. The use of magickal and psionic Power is so incredibly personal we’d be fools to do otherwise.

  The tingling on my skin was my body adjusting to the flux of Power in the rainy air, the transport well was full so we had docked in an auxiliary outside bay. Rain misted down, a thin barely-autumn drizzle that smelled of hoverwash, the salt from the bay, and the peculiar damp radioactive smell of Saint City.

  Home. Funny how the longer I spent chasing down bounties, the more I thought of Saint City as home.

  “You coming home?” Jace tapped the butt of his staff against the concrete, but gently. Just a punctuation, not the sharp guncrack of frustration. His wheat-gold hair was beginning to darken and slick itself down with the drizzle; the bruise had faded and I could see the faint pulsing of the healcharm I’d laid on him. He’d slept on the transport, I hadn’t; but we were both night creatures. Being out in the light of early morning was guaranteed to make both of us cranky. Not to mention he’d need a few hours or so to reaccustom himself to the flux of ambient Power here, we hadn’t been gone long enough for his body to set itself to Jersey’s Power flux. It was like hoverlag, when the body isn’t sure whether it’s day or night because of the speed of transport, only harder and if a psion was drained and exhausted enough potentially very painful.

  Glancing at the glass doors, I found my voice. Wherever we were going, we could take the lifts down to the street together. If I wanted to. “No, I’ve got a few things to do.”

  “I thought so.” He nodded sagely, a tall, spare man with a quick famous grin, his assassin’s rig easy over his black T-shirt and jeans, the dotanuki thrust through his belt and his staff in hand. If it wasn’t for the accreditation tat, he might have been a holovid star himself. But there were fine fans at the corners of his eyes that hadn’t been there before, and he looked tired, leaning on his staff for support instead of effect. The last ten months hadn’t been easy on him. “It’s the Anniversary, isn’t it.”

  I didn’t think you’d remember, Jace. The last time you saw me do this was years ago. Before Rio. Before you left me. I nodded, biting my lower lip. It was a sign of nervousness I never would have permitted myself, before. “Yeah. I’m glad we’re back in town, I… well, missing it would be rough.” He nodded. “I’m going to pop in at Cherk’s and have a drink before I go home.” He tipped me a wink, the patented Jace Monroe grin flashing. That smile used to line up the Mob groupies for him, he never had any trouble with women—as he was so fond of remarking—until he met me. “Maybe I’ll get all drunk and you can take advantage of me.”

  Damn the man, he was making me smile. “In your dreams. Go on home, I’ll be along. Don’t get too drunk.”

  “ ’Course not.” He shrugged and stepped away, heading for the door.

  I wanted to go after him, walk down to the street together, but I stood very still and closed my eyes. My right hand lifted, almost of its own accord, and rubbed at the numb spot on my left shoulder. Was it tingling more than it had before?

  Stop it, Dante. It was the stern voice of my conscience again. Japh’s gone. Live with it.

  I am, I told that deep voice. Go away.

  It went, promising to come back later and taunt me. I rubbed my shoulder, scrubbing at it with my knuckles since my fingers were curled under and cramped. At least it didn’t hurt anymore. Not there, anyway.

  I wondered, not for the last time, why the mark hadn’t faded with Japh’s death. Of course, Lucifer had first burned it into my skin.

  That was an uncomfortable thought, to say the least.

  Jace was nowhere in sight when I took the lifts down and emerged blinking again into the gray day. Down on the street the drizzle had turned to puddles vibrating with hoverwash and splashing up whenever an airbike or wheelbike went by, the ground hovertraffic moving a little bit slower than usual. The sidewalks were crowded with people, most of them normals intent on their own business, since the psions would probably be home in bed. It felt good to walk, my hands dangling loose by my sides and my braid bumping my back, my boots light on cracked pavement. Bulgarov had been left in a holding cell in Jersey lockdown; the fee for the collar plus the extra 15 percent I’d told Trina to charge was probably safely in Jace’s bank account by now. I didn’t need the money, as there was plenty left from Lucifer’s payoff. Even though I had no qualm about using it, I still flinched internally whenever I looked at my statements or signed on through my computer deck. Blood money, a payment for the life Lucifer had manipulated and cajoled me into taking, even though left to myself I would have killed Santino.

  I had needed revenge. Lucifer still owed me, both for Doreen’s daughter and for Japhrimel. I didn’t have a chance of collecting, but still. He owed me, and I owed my life to a dead demon.

  I winced, pacing through the rainy gray Saint City morning. The Prince of Hell might still be keeping an eye on me.

  I owed him nothing, and that was exactly what the Prince of Hell was going to get from me. End of story.

  Think about something else, Dante. You’ve got a lot to brood over. Like Jace.

  Jace had given up his Mob Family for me, just handed it over to his second-in-command without a word and signed the papers for cessation-of-ownership. After fighting so hard to get his own Family he’d turned his back on it and showed up at my door.

  Dante, you are spectacularly good at thinking things you don’t want to.

  It took me an hour to get to the corner of Seventh and Cherry. I had stopped at a street vendor’s for a bouquet of yellow daisies, and I stood on the south corner under the awning of a grocery store that had been put in two years ago. The times I’d been here with Lewis, there had been a used bookstore across the way.

  My pulse beat thinly in my temples and throat, as if I was taking down a bounty again. I clutched the daisies in their plasticine wrap, their cheerful yellow heads with black centers nodding as I held them in my trembling right hand. Coming back here every year was a penance, maybe, but who else would remember him? Lewis had no family, substituting the psionic kids he fostered for a real blood link. And to me, he was the only family I’d known, my caseworker from the time I was an infant until I was thirteen.

  If I was anything to be proud of, it was because Lewis had taught me how to be.

  Memory rose. That’s the curse of being a psion, I suppose. The Magi techniques for training the memory are necessary and ruthless. A Magi-trained memory can remember every detail of a scene, a magick circle, a canon of runes, a page of text. Necessary when one is performing Greater Works of magick, where everything has to be done right the first time, but merciless when things happen that you want to forget.

  The prickling in my shoulder had gone down, thankfully. There wasn’t much of a crowd here, most passersby ducked into the small grocery and came out carrying a plasbag full of alcohol bottles or synth-hash cigarettes. I stood just around the corner, tucked out of the way close to the wall, and stilled myself, forcing the memories to come clear and clean.

  He’d brought me down to the bookstore, a special treat, and the smooth metal of the collar against my throat was less heavy on that unseasonably sunny autumn day. The crisp cinnamon smell of dried leaves hung in the air and the sky was impossibly deep blue, the type of blue that only comes in autumn. Blue enough to make the eyes ache, blue enough to drown in. Lewis had pushed hi
s spectacles up on his beaky nose, and we walked together. I didn’t hold his hand like I did when I was a little girl, having grown self-conscious in the last few years. I had ached to tell him something, anything, about how bad things were at school, but I couldn’t find the nerve.

  And so we walked, and Lewis drew me out, asking me about the last books I’d read, the copy of Cicero he’d loaned me and the Aurelius he was saving for if I did well on my Theory of Magick final coming up at the end of the term. And did you enjoy the Ovid? he asked, almost bouncing with glee inside his red T-shirt and jeans. He didn’t dress like a social worker, and that was one more thing to love about him. He had given me my name, my love of books, and my twelve-year-old self had cherished wild fantasies of finding out that Lew really was my father and was just waiting for the right time to tell me.

  I enjoyed it, I told him, but the man was obsessed with women.

  Most men are. Lewis found the oddest things funny, and it was only once I reached adulthood that I understood the jokes. When I was young, of course, I had laughed with him, just happy that he was happy with me, feeling the warm bath of his approval.

  I had been about to reply when the man blundered around the corner, jittering and wide-eyed, stinking of Clormen-13. It was a Chillfreak desperate for his next dose, his eyes fastening on the antique chronograph Lewis wore, a glittering thing above his datband and looking pawnable. Confusion and chaos, and a knife. Lewis yelled for me to run, my feet rooted to the ground as the Chillfreak’s knife glittered, throwing back a hot dart of sunlight that hurt my eyes. Run, Danny! Run!

  My eyes were hot and grainy. Drizzle had soaked into my hair and coat. I was standing exactly where I’d stood before I’d obeyed him, turning and running, screaming while the Chillfreak descended on Lewis.

  The cops had caught the freak, of course, but the chronograph was gone and the man’s brain so eaten by Chill he could barely remember his own name, let alone what he’d done with the piece of antique trash. And Lew, with his books and his love and his gentleness, had left me for Death’s dry country, that land where I was still a stranger even if I’d known my way to its borders.

  I laid the flowers down on the wet sidewalk, as I did every year, their plaswrap crinkling. The bloodstone ring on my third left finger flashed wetly, a random dart of Power splashing from its opaque surface. “Hey,” I whispered. “Hi.”

  He had a grave marker, of course, out in the endlessly-green fields of Mounthope. But that was too far for a student to ride public transport and get back to the school by curfew, so I ended up coming here, downtown, where he had died almost immediately. If I’d been older, combat-trained and a full Necromance, I could have run off the Chillfreak or mended Lewis’s violated body, held him to life, kept him from sliding off the bridge and into the abyss, under the blue glow of Death… if I’d been older. If I’d had some presence of mind I could have distracted the Chillfreak, diverted his attention; wearing a collar meant I couldn’t have used any psionic ability on him, but there were other ways. Other things I could have done.

  Other things I should have done.

  “I miss you,” I whispered. I had only missed two Anniversaries, my first year at the Academy up north and the year Doreen died. Murdered, in fact, by a demon I hadn’t known was a demon at the time. “I miss you so much.”

  Nihil desperandum! he would crow. Never fear!

  Other kids were raised on fairy tales. Lew raised me on Cicero and Confucius, Milton and Cato, Epictetus and Sophocles, Shakespeare. Dumas. And for special treats, Suetonius, Blake, Gibbon, and Juvenal. These are the books that have survived, Lew would remind me, because they are as close to immortal as you can get. They’re good books, Dante, true books, and they’ll help you.

  And oh, they had.

  I came back to myself with a jolt. Morning hovertraffic whined and buzzed overhead. I heard footsteps, people passing by on Cherry to get to the shops, but nobody going down this side of Seventh because it was apartment buildings, and everyone was gone for the day, or in bed. The daisies, a bright spot of color against cracked hard pavement, glowed under the thickening rain.

  “All right,” I said softly. “See you next year, I guess.”

  I turned slowly on my heel. The first steps, as usual, were the hardest, but I didn’t look back. I had another appointment today. Jace would beat me home, and he would probably already have a few holovids from the rental shop on Trivisidero. Maybe some old Father Egyptos, we both loved that show and could quote damn near every line of dialogue. What evil creeps in the shadows? Egyptos, the bearer of the Scarab of Light, shall reveal all!

  Uncharacteristically, I was smiling. Again.

  CHAPTER 2

  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 shortsword, 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 gene-splicing. 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 placemats 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?”