Dante Valentine

by Lilith Saintcrow

  “Pervert.” The stench of human cells, dying decaying dead, rose up to choke me.

  How did Japhrimel stand it? I wondered, and my left shoulder suddenly burned as if something hot was pressed against it, scorching the skin, twisting. I could almost feel the scar writhing on my skin.

  I stopped dead. Jace nearly ran into me, stopped just in time, the bones tied to his staff clicking together. His Power stroked me briefly, a pleasant touch that would have unloosed my knees and made my breath catch if I hadn’t been struggling to make my lungs work, my skin running prickly with demon Power. “Danny?”

  “Nothing.” These flashes of heat were getting more and more pronounced lately. I wondered if I was going into demon menopause.

  There was another, nastier idea. I wondered if the flashes of heat had anything to do with the Prince of Hell.

  What a nightmare-inducing thought. Assuming I could sleep, that is. I put my head down, started forward again, lengthening my stride to catch up with Gabe. “Just a thought.”

  “What kind of thought?” He sounded only mildly curious, his staff tapping in time with our footsteps.

  “The private kind, J-man. Back off.”

  “Fine.” Easy and calm, he let it drop. How he managed to do that I could never guess—it took a lot to ruffle his smooth surface. Maybe it was growing up in a Mob family that did it, made him so hard and blank; impenetrable. Or maybe it was putting up with me. Why did you hand over your Family, Jace? Just give it up? People have killed to stay in Families, let alone control them. You could have had everything you ever wanted. Why?

  I wished I could find the words to ask him.

  Gabe stopped in front of another door. Her bobbed hair swung as she turned her head slightly, a quarter-profile as pure as an ancient marble in a statis-sealed museum case. “Word to the wise. Caine’s a Ludder.”

  I felt my lip curl up. A genesplice-is-murder, psions-are-aberration, Luddite-Text-thumping fanatic. They were everywhere these days. “Great. He’s going to love me.”

  Gabe opened her mouth to reply, but the frosted-glass window set in the door darkened. The hinges squealed, and I had to kill the sardonic smile that wanted to creep up my face. I had the distinct idea that the hinges were deliberately left dry. Come into my parlor, said the medical examiner to the hapless police detective. My right hand tightened, searching for the hilt of a sword. I actually twitched before I remembered I didn’t have a katana anymore. My hand ached, one vicious cramp settling into the bones and twisting briefly before letting go. Getting better. It used to ache all the time, now it only ached when I wanted to reach for a hilt and found only empty air.

  “Gabriele,” the stick-thin elderly man said. His eyes, poached blue eggs over a bloodless mouth and pale powdery cheeks, swam behind thick plasrefractive lenses. His lab coat was pristine, the magtag on his pocket read R. Caine. He’d chosen a caduceus logo on the tag; it reminded me of my own accreditation tat. A mad giggle rose up inside of me, was suppressed, and died an inglorious death as an almost-burp. “And some company. How charming.”

  “Afternoon, Dr. Caine.” Gabe’s voice was flat, monotone. Deliberately noncombative, but slightly disdainful at the same time. “I presume Captain Algernon has spoken with you.”

  If he could have sneered, he probably would have. Instead, his eyes lingered on me. The pink dome of his scalp under a few thinning gray-white strands of combed-over hair added to the egglike appearance of his head; no cosmetic hair implants for this gentleman. His teeth were still strong and sound, but they were terribly discolored, shocking in this age of molecular dental repair. Like the dry hinges, his teeth were probably deliberate too. “This is most irregular,” he sniffed. “What is that?”

  “Dante Valentine, Dr. Caine. Dr. Caine, Dante Valentine.” Gabe moved slightly to one side, still between the doctor and me. I got the impression she was ready to jam her boot in the door if he decided to try to slam it shut.

  “Pleased to meet you.” I lied with a straight face, for once.

  His watery blue eyes narrowed behind the lenses. “What are you?”

  I set my shoulders. I’d been given the cold shoulder by a lot of normals, he was going to have to work harder than that to irritate me. “The proper term is hedaira, Doctor. I’m a genetically altered human.” The words stuck in my throat, dry and lumpy. Wouldn’t you love to know, Doctor. I didn’t ask for this to be done to me. And I have no idea what hedaira even means. The only person who could have told me is ash in a black urn. When I’m not hallucinating his disembodied voice to flog myself with, that is. “Although I suspect abomination is the term you’re looking for. Let’s get this over with.”

  “Who did your genesplicing?” He licked his thin, colorless lips. “It looks like an expensive job.”

  Expensive? I guess you could say so. It cost me my life and someone I loved. I felt it like a sharp pinch on already-bruised flesh. So maybe he would manage to annoy me. One point for the Ludder doctor. “That’s none of your business. I’m here to view a body in a legitimate murder investigation. Should I come back with a court order?” My voice made the glass in the door rattle slightly. I think I’m behaving badly. A lunatic giggle rose up again inside of me. Why did I always have the urge to laugh at times like this?

  Dr. Caine’s wiry eyebrows nested in his nonexistent hairline. “Of course not. I know my duty to the police department. Despite their habit of sending me cadavers.”

  “Why, Doctor, I thought it was your job to deal with cadavers.” I didn’t move, my feet nailed to the floor despite Jace’s sudden grip on my elbow. I hated the syrupy sweetness in my voice—it meant that I was about to say something unforgivable. “Perhaps you should retire.”

  “Not until I’m forced to, young woman. Come inside.” He laughed mechanically and didn’t look pleased, but ushered us into a small office jammed with a desk, two chairs, two antique and crooked metal file cabinets, piles of papers and files, and a thriving blue-flowered orchid on top of another file cabinet, this one wooden and glowing mellow with polish. That was interesting. Nearly as interesting was the dry-erase board set on the wall across from the second door. Dr. Caine’s handwriting was spidery, and it wandered inside the neatly-ruled sections, keeping track of what body was in what bay and what tests needed to be done. At least, that’s what I assumed the complicated numbers and letters meant. It looked like a code based on the old Cyrillic alphabet.

  “Now I want it to be very clear,” he said, once we were all crowded in his office, “this is happening against my will, and under my protest.”

  “Mine too,” I muttered under my breath, taking refuge in snideness. Gabe cast me an imploring glance. I shut up.

  The good doctor studied me for a long moment. I noticed he had two lasepens in his breast pocket and a capped scalpel too. “The body is of a Necromance.” His lip curled. “Cause of death, as nearly as we can determine, was some type of psionic assault.”

  That was something new. Dr. Caine noticed my sudden attention. “We can tell because of the MRI and sigwave scans.” He directed his words at me. “Bleeding in the cortex in characteristic star-patterns. It seems that, just as manual strangulation leaves petechiae, psionic assault resulting in death leaves these starbursts of blood and scarring in the brain.”

  Thank you for that incredibly vivid mental image, Doctor. I glanced around his office again. I smelled chemical reek, dying human cells, and pipe tobacco mixed with synth hash. So the good Doc was a smoker. Most medical personnel were. His hands didn’t tremble, but they were liver-spotted and thin as spider’s legs. I imagined his hands on a lasecutter and had to shudder. He probably talks to the cadavers. And very patronizingly, too. I glanced up at the ceiling, where the random holes in the soundbreak tiles almost began to run together and make sense. Dust swirled in the air, forming little geometric shapes as the room heated up with four adult bodies in it—and the extra heat I was putting out. Power trembled at the outer edges of my control, straining to leap free. I inv
oked spread-thin control, clenching my right fist so hard I felt the claws prick my palm. It felt comfortingly like fingernails digging in as I made a fist.

  “What kind of psionic assault?” Gabe asked. “Feeder, Ceremonial, Magi, what?”

  “I am unable to determine. I was under the impression that was your job.” This sneer he directed at me. I ignored it. Instead, I studied the dry-erase board, watching the shape of the letters blur as I unfocused my eyes. With it all hazy, I could almost pretend there was a pattern there too. If I spent a little Power, I could probably decode it, my minor precognitive talent turning a randomness into a glimpse of the future.

  I came back to myself with a barely-covered start. Took a deep breath. I couldn’t afford to get distracted here. No amount of precog was worth even a momentary lapse in attention.

  “What else can you tell me, Doctor?” Gabe was in her element. I almost forgot she was a cop; she looked like a wide-eyed med student. Caine preened under her attention. I overrode the urge to rub at my left shoulder. The mark was burning, a piercing, drilling, fiery pain I only felt rarely over the last year. Was it just because I had allowed myself to think of Japhrimel again? Was thinking of him more frequently now?

  As if I ever stopped thinking about him, even while I was being shot at by panicked, psychopathic bounties.

  “There is a high likelihood that Miss Moorcock was also sexually assaulted before she was dismembered.” Caine’s poached eyes glittered. “There was tearing and severe bruising in the vaginal vault. Unfortunately, we were unable to recover any DNA evidence because of contamination by blood and foreign matter in the vagina.”

  My throat closed again, hot bile rising. Why do I keep wanting to throw up? I braced myself. Jace’s thumb drifted across my elbow, a soothing touch.

  Too bad I wasn’t soothed.

  Gabe waited.

  “There’s nothing else,” he said finally. I’d have bet my house and the rest of Lucifer’s blood money Caine was enjoying this. “We’re running toxicology screens and reanalyzing some of the forensic measurements.”

  “Reanalyzing?” Gabe fractionally raised one eyebrow.

  “Either we have made an error, or whatever ripped her into pieces did it simultaneously. Her arms, her legs, her head—all at the same time. As if she was quartered. Are you familiar with quartering, Ms. Valentine?”

  His poached-egg eyes rested on me now, his thin mouth curved into the slightest of smiles. I dropped my right hand back down to my side, both my hand and shoulder burning. “I’m somewhat of a student of history, Doctor. I’m familiar with the term.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The tiled vault of the body-bay was chilly. Steam rose off my skin as soon as I stepped through the airseals into climate control. I had to spend a moment’s worth of attention readjusting—my internal thermostat was set on “high.” I ran very warm these days, not needing a pile of blankets like I used to when I was human. That was one thing Jace had been good for during our affair, even though he ended up kicking off the covers. I supposed it was living in Rio that made him so warm.

  Nowadays, if he collapsed on my bed it was because he was drunk, and he slept on top of the covers more often than not, or woke when I poked him in the ribs to haul himself down the hall to his own room.

  I scanned the room habitually—nothing but the usual security net and countermeasures; the holovid captures set in strips along the ceiling to get everything in 3-D. Steel lockers took up one side of the room, tools hung neatly, racks of equipment and scanners. My teeth ached until I took a deep breath and made my jaw relax.

  The tough blue plasticine bodybag lay on the stainless-steel table. The shape was subtly wrong, of course—there were only parts of Christabel Moorcock left.

  I was alone in a morgue with a body. My skin roughened, smoothed out. All of a sudden I was more comfortable than I’d been for almost a year. I knew how to do this. I’d been doing this most of my life.

  Then what are you afraid of? a cool, deep voice asked inside my head. I shut that voice back up in its little black box. It hurt too much to hear the shading of male amusement, the flat ironic tone of a demon’s voice stroking the most intimate of my thoughts. Why couldn’t I just let the sound of his voice go?

  What was I afraid of? Oh, nothing. Except for maybe finding him waiting for me on the other side of Death’s bridge, his hands clasped behind his back and that faint smile on his face. The last time I’d brought a soul out of Death like this, Japhrimel had been with me, watching.

  The intercom crackled. “Whenever you’re ready, Danny,” Gabe said from the observation deck outside. This would be taped, of course, since it would be admitted into evidence as part of the investigation. “Just take it slow.”

  Take it slow, she says, a nasty mental snigger caroled across my brain. It’s not her ass on the line here.

  It wasn’t precisely that I was afraid—after all, I still had my tat and my emerald. My patron god still accepted my offerings. I missed the touch of my god, missed the absolute certainty of the thing I knew I was best at. The contact with a psychopomp is so achingly personal for a Necromance. My god would not deny me.

  No, I was only afraid of myself.

  I reached up, touched my left shoulder. The mark burned with a fierce, steady ache now. As painful as it was, I welcomed it. It had burned like that when Japhrimel was alive—as if a live brand was resting on my skin. I had never thought nerve-scorching pain could be comforting. The mark would turn ice-cold soon enough as whatever made it heat up faded, and I would be left with the reminder that the demon it named was dead.

  Dead, maybe. Forgotten, no. And Lucifer…

  I didn’t want to think about the Prince of Hell.

  I had no sword, but my right-hand knife was good steel, and I held it loosely. Two glassed-in white candles stood on a wheeled cart between me and the body. Cool air touched my forehead, caressed my cheekbones and the shallow V of skin exposed by my shirt. My right hand cramped slightly on the knifehilt, then eased suddenly.

  I had to look.

  I skirted the cart and approached the table with its plaswrapped burden, the soles of my boots scritching slightly on the easy-to-hose plaslino floor. The silvery drain set below the table gave out a whiff of chlorine and decaying blood.

  The intercom crackled again. “Danny?”

  You of all people should know that I just can’t barge into this headfirst. Though I don’t know why, that’s my usual style. “Just relax, Gabe. I need to see.”

  “Danny—”

  “I won’t touch the body. I’m going to unzip the sheath, that’s all. It will make it easier.” I heard my own voice, calmer than I really felt; I was a master at sounding like I knew what I was doing.

  “For who?” It was a blind attempt at humor, and it failed dreadfully. I glanced up at the observation window, felt my lip curl up slightly. The magshielding in the walls was good, I could only feel them through the window—Gabe a cool purple bath of worry; Jace, spiky, spiced electric honey, every nerve suddenly focused on me; and Caine’s dry, smooth, egglike aura, giving nothing away. Blind natural shielding, a disbelief so huge it could protect him from psychic assault. Some normals were like that. They literally wouldn’t believe their own eyes when it came to magick.

  I wondered what he thought of psions, since he was so disbelieving. Of course, he was a Ludder, he probably thought we should all be put in camps like the Evangelicals of Gilead did during the Seventy Days War. Rounded up, shot, and put in disposal units. Ludders hated genesplicing on principle, but they hated psions with an atavistic revulsion as irrational as it was deep. It didn’t matter that we’d been born this way, according to the Ludders we were abominations and all deserved to die.

  “Don’t ride me, Gabe. It’s not recommended.” I wasn’t amused.

  “Then just get this done so you can go home and drink.” She wasn’t amused either. Guess we were even.

  Like drinking will help. I can’t even get drunk anymore. M
y fingers closed around the cold zipper. I drew it down with a long ripping sound.

  At least they had put the parts where they were supposed to be. I wondered what was missing—I hadn’t looked at the preliminary report yet. The stink of death belched up, assaulting my sensitive nose.

  Sensory acuity was a curse sometimes. No wonder demons carried their personal perfume around like a shield. I wished I could. “Christabel,” I said. “Sekhmet sa’es.”

  The air stirred uneasily. There was no dust here, but I felt the Power in the air—my own—tremble unsteadily, like a smooth pond touched by a hover field. Not rippling but quivering, just about to slide free of control and plunge into chaos.

  Well. That’s odd.

  I backed up. I didn’t need to see more than her ruined, rotting face. I retreated to the other side of the room, swallowing hard. A snap of my fingers as I passed the steel cart lit the candles. I used to get such a kick out of doing that.

  Back before Japhrimel. “Kill the lights, Gabe.”

  “All right.” A popping sound, and three-quarters of the fluorescents went dim. The ones that remained lit buzzed steadily, maddeningly. It was better lit than the warehouse had been. I briefly wondered where Bulgarov was now, if they’d run him through the courtroom and into a gasbox yet. No, it was too soon. I wouldn’t need to testify, I’d only done the collar.

  Quit dithering, Danny. The bounty’s over. Focus on what’s in front of you.

  I held the knife up, steel glimmering, a bar between me and whatever happened next. “Here goes nothing,” I murmured. “Dante Valentine, accredited Necromance, performing an apparition on the body of Christabel Moorcock, also accredited Necromance.” And I hope like hell she has something to tell us.

  “Got it,” Gabe said. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  I sighed. Then I closed my eyes. I had no more time to screw around.

  It was easy, too easy. I dropped below conscious thought, into the blue glow of whatever juncture of talent and genetics allowed me to see the dead. I wasn’t touching the body—I couldn’t stand the thought of resting my hand on that plastic—so I expected there to be a time lag, some difficulty, maybe a barrier between me and the blue crystal walls of Death’s antechamber.