Dante Valentine

by Lilith Saintcrow

  “It would take more than a few months for me to forget that, sensei,” I told him. It felt so good to hold a sword again. Complete. Right.

  “It always takes long time, forgetting anything painful.” He nodded sagely, and my eyes met his. We both bowed to each other again, and I surprised myself by laughing when he did.

  CHAPTER 11

  I wasn’t paying much attention as I rounded the corner, still loose and easy and smelling of healthy effort. I’d kept my house, and bought the two houses on either side with some of the blood money from the Santino bounty. Knocking the two houses down and building a wall around my place was the best step I ever took for privacy. I’d gotten the idea from Gabe. She inherited her private walls, I had to build my own.

  My left shoulder burned with steady hot pain. I wondered if the mark would start to eat at my skin, and the last of my good mood fled.

  Lucifer, maybe? What are the chances that he’s involved in this mess? But no, there was no smell of demon on Christabel. I’m fairly sure I’d smell that. And this is too much gore for a demon, not even Santino was this messy.

  Still, thinking about the Prince of Hell made a slight, rippling chill go up my back. It was fairly obvious he was still keeping an eye on me, for what purpose I didn’t like to guess.

  Screw Lucifer. He can wait until I’ve found out who’s killing psions.

  A click alerted me. I didn’t stop, but my shields thinned, and I felt the hungry mood circling my front gate. The defenses on my walls sparked and glittered. The curtain of Power would short out any holovid receiver that got too close.

  Oh, damn. Reporters.

  They hadn’t noticed me yet. The click I’d heard was someone tucked behind a streetlamp, taking stills of my walls. His back was to me, sloping under a tan trench coat, uncoordinated dark hair standing up. Purple dusk was falling, and bright lights began to switch on. He was a normal, and therefore blind to the eddies and swirls I caused in the landscape of Power.

  I stood aside in shadow, melding with a neighbor’s laurel hedge, and watched them for a few minutes. Holovids, I thought, blankly. What the hell do they want with me? Oh, yeah. Sekhmet sa’es, who tipped them off? Less than twenty-four hours on the case and there’s already a leak. Wonderful. Perfect. Great.

  My knuckles whitened against the swordhilt. The sword was a slightly-heavier katana, a beautiful, curving, deadly blade in its reinforced black-lacquered scabbard, older than the Parapsychic Act. I had expected it to feel strange to hold a sword again. I’d expected my right hand to cramp and seize up.

  It didn’t. In fact, it felt more natural than ever to curl my fingers around the hilt. Natural, and painless. I could pull the blade free of the sheath in one motion.

  It’s not my sword yet. My fingers eased up a little. It would take time and Power before the blade would respond like my old sword had, made into a psychic weapon as much as a physical one.

  A lance of exquisite pain through my fingers made my hand spasm around the hilt. I drew in a soft breath, watching the holovid reporters circle in front of my gate, their klieg lights blaring, trying to get a good shot of my house. No hovers—they must have gotten some aerial shots already. Jace. Had he managed to slip inside unseen?

  I finally cut through someone’s weedy front yard and down the dirt-packed alley that had marked my neighbor’s property line before I’d bought the place. No reporters back here yet, thank the gods.

  My shields quivered, straining. I stopped, staring at my wall; the layers of energy I’d warded it with were flushing and pulsating a deep crimson. Demon-laid shields, Necromance shields, layers that Jace had applied, of spiky Shaman darkness. I calmed the restive energy with a touch and felt Jace inside, his sudden attention stinging against my receptive mind.

  It was a bit of work to scale the wall; I’d contracted one of the best construction guys in the city to make it smooth concrete, aesthetic razor spikes standing up from the top. Demon-quick reflexes saved me; I hauled myself up and over with little trouble, my boots thudding down in the back garden. Water tinkled from a fountain, the smell of green growing things closing around me. I inhaled deeply, the air pressure changing—Jace’s silent greeting, one psi to another.

  When I slid the back door open, stepping over a pile of flat slate tiles I planned on turning into divination runeplates, he met me with a cup of coffee and a grim expression. He hadn’t started drinking yet, but the night was young. I didn’t stare at him only by an effort of will.

  “Hey,” I managed. “Looks like we’ve got company.”

  “Oh, yeah. Fucking vultures.” His lip curled. Mob freelancers hate reporters a little more than the rest of us, and Jace was no exception. There’s a reason why psis don’t work for the holovids.

  Well, besides the obvious fact that they would never hire a psionic actor or talking head. It was illegal to discriminate—but the natural antipathy we felt for the way we were shown on the holovids, mixed with the reluctance of the studio heads to put a psion on the air and lose a chunk of Ludder ratings, equaled no psionic actors. Status quo, just like usual.

  “Nice sword.” That was as close to a comment as Jace would allow himself.

  I shrugged. “Thought it was time I started practicing again. How’d you make out?”

  A sudden grin lit his face. “Pulled a few old strings, visited a few old friends. Got you the invite, for tonight. You can take a servant with you, it says. Need me?”

  I actually considered it for a few moments, then looked at him. There were fine lines at the corners of his eyes, his mouth was pulled into a straight line, and he was bleary-eyed from too much Chivas, too many bounties, and not enough sleep. His clothes were rumpled, and I saw a shadow of stubble along his jaw. It occurred to me that my friends were getting older.

  And I looked just the same, when I could bring myself to glance in the mirror. Golden skin and dark eyes, and a demon’s beauty. A gift I’d neither wanted nor asked for.

  I shook my head. “I need you to research for me, remember?” Even my hair shifted uneasily; the vision of Jace walking into the House of Pain was enough to make me shiver. I wasn’t sanguine about going in there myself. Despite the fact that nonhuman paranormals had legal rights and voting blocs, they still didn’t like to get too chummy with humans. I didn’t blame them. “I need to know a couple of things, and you’re just the man to find out.”

  He folded his arms, his tattoo thorn-twisting on his unshaven cheek. “You are a spectacularly bad liar, once someone knows you,” he informed me flatly.

  “What?” Now I was feeling defensive, and I hadn’t even gotten ten feet inside my own back door yet. The papers lying on the closer end of my kitchen counter stirred uneasily, whispering. I wondered if there was another parchment envelope in today’s mail.

  Pushed the thought away. Jace, for the sake of every god that ever was, please don’t ask to go to the House of Pain. I worry enough about you on regular bounties. I closed my lips over the words, swallowed them. That was the surest way to piss him off, implying that he was less than capable.

  He planted his booted feet and regarded me with the cocky half-smile meaning he was on the verge of irritation. “I won’t break, Danny. I’ve seen worse than this, and I know how to take care of myself. Quit treating me like I’m second-class, all right?”

  “Jace—” This was not the conversation I wanted to have with him right now. Why does he always pick the worst goddamn time to throw his little hissy fits?

  “Maybe I’m not a demon,” he said quietly, “but I used to be good enough for you once. And I’ve kept up my end of the bounties, haven’t I?”

  He did not just say that to me. My stomach turned into a stone fist, heat rising to my cheeks. The windows bowed slightly, rattling, and I took a deep breath. If I blew my own fucking house down it would be even more fodder for the vultures outside. Instead, I pushed past him, gently enough not to hurt him, only sending him backward a few steps. My teeth buried in my lower lip, I stalked th
rough the kitchen, down the hall, and up the stairs.

  Halfway up the stairs, Anubis’s statue stood nine inches tall, slim and black, glowing with Power inside the altar-niche. Two unlit black novenas stood on either side; I had scattered rose petals and poured a shallow black bowl of wine for him. The wine’s surface trembled as I stopped, looking into the niche.

  Set to one side, a black lacquer urn glowed. No dust lay against its slick wet surface. No dust ever touched it, and no whisper of the ashes it held ever reached me. I’d spent hours staring at it, I knew every curve of the smooth surface. I had even once or twice caught myself opening my mouth to say something to the urn. I’d drawn chalk circles and tried solitary Magi conjurings out of shadowjournals; altering the runes and circles, trying to find my key to weaken the fabric of reality and call him to me. I’d tried to use my tarot cards and runes—but the answers I got were always fuzzy, slippery, fading. Nothingness, emptiness, dissolution. My own desperate hope managed to make any information I could get from divination useless.

  My shoulder burned. But my right hand, clamped around the swordhilt, did not hurt.

  Japhrimel. I didn’t say it. My lips shaped the word, that was all.

  He isn’t there, Danny. Stop torturing yourself.

  But had he waited for me there before slipping into the abyss?

  Don’t think about that, Danny. Sekhmet sa’es, he’s gone. He’s not in Death. You’ve seen he’s not there. Stop it.

  I just couldn’t help myself.

  Who would ask the questions for me if I managed to make an apparition of my dead demon lover appear? Certainly not Jace. It was too much to ask even Gabe for, and she was the only Necromance who might conceivably do such a thing for me.

  I heard Jace’s short plosive curse downstairs. Was he listening? He could probably tell from any slight sound where I was in the house. That is, if he didn’t simply extend his senses and See me. He could tell I was in front of the niche. I’d caught him standing here once or twice too, usually after I’d spent my days between bounties in the living room staring at the urn’s smooth sides, reluctantly replacing it every time. When I wasn’t feverishly researching demons, searching for any clue about the Fallen, that is. I didn’t know what Jace would say to Japhrimel’s ashes. I didn’t even want to guess.

  Jace could certainly tell I was standing here.

  Well, Anubis is my patron, I thought, my fingers tightening. I never asked Jace to come here.

  You never sent him away either, the pitiless voice of my conscience replied. Was it me, or did it sound like Japhrimel’s? Not the level, robotic voice he’d used when I first met him, no. Instead, it was the deep almost-human voice he’d used to whisper to me while I shuddered, wrapped in barbed-wire pleasure and his arms.

  I sighed. The fingers of my left hand hovered centimeters from the urn’s surface. What would I feel if I touched it now, my senses raw from pulling Christabel Moorcock’s screaming, insane ghost out of Death, my body loose from sparring with Jado and sweating out the chill touch of that dry country where Anubis stood, endlessly waiting for me?

  I let out a soft curse of my own and continued up the stairs. It was useless to waste time. I had to get ready. If I was going to the House of Pain, I wanted to be dressed appropriately.

  Oh, damn. I’m going to have to take the whip.

  CHAPTER 12

  Jace stood in the living room, his arms folded, the portable holovid player bathing the room in its spectral pink glow. He hit the mute button as soon as I appeared. I held the cloak over my arm, a long fall of sable velvet; I’d managed a tolerable French twist with my recalcitrant hair. The earrings brushed my cheeks as I tossed my head impatiently, making sure the long, thin stilettos holding the twist steady were not likely to fall out. It would be highly embarrassing to meet the prime paranormal Power in the city and have weapons fall out of my hair.

  Jace looked up, his mouth opening as if he would say something. Instead, he stopped, his jaw dropping further open. His pupils dilated, making his eyes seem dark instead of blue.

  “What?” I sounded annoyed. “Look, it’s the House of Pain. I can’t wear jeans and a T-shirt, much as I’d rather.”

  “You would have before.” But his mouth quirked up in a smile. I felt my own mouth curl in response.

  “I’d have never gotten an invitation before. They don’t let humans in, especially not psis. Look, Jace—”

  He was suddenly all business. “Research. What d’ya want me to find?” He flicked the holovid off, bent down to touch his staff where it lay against the couch, then straightened, his back to me. “I’ll bet you’re thinking of someone instead of something, right?”

  I hate your habit of anticipating me, Jace. I always have. “I need you to find out everything you can about our normal.” I rotated my shoulders back and then forward, making sure the rig sat easy. Before, I’d always carried my sword—no use having a blade if it’s not to hand, Jado often said, but I’d need my hands for other things tonight. My rig, supple oiled black leather, complemented the black silk of the dress and the sword-hilt poked up over my right shoulder. The back-carry was buckled to my usual rig. Drawing a sword is quicker when the hilt is over one’s shoulder instead of at the hip, and it keeps the scabbard from knocking into things too. It was a compromise, like everything else.

  Chunky dress-combat boots with silver buckles hid under the long skirt. I was unwilling to sacrifice any mobility to high heels; I’d already lose out because of the damn dress. The necklace was silver-dipped raccoon baculum strung on fine silver chain twined with black velvet ribbon and blood-marked bloodstones, powerful Shaman mojo. Jace had made the necklace for me during our first year together. He had poured his Power into it, using his own blood in the workings over the bloodstones, his skill and his affection for me as well as every defense a Shaman knew how to weave. I had locked it away when he left, unable to burn it as I’d burned everything else that reminded me of him; but now it seemed silly to go into the lion’s den without all the protection I could muster. My rings shifted and spat, shimmering in the depths of each stone. “He’s our first victim, there has to be a reason it started with him.”

  “You got it.” His eyes dropped below my chin. The dress had a low, square neckline with a laced-up slit going down almost to my bellybutton; my breasts offered like golden fruit thanks to the shape and cut. The slender silver curves of the baculum were a contrast against velvety golden skin. The sleeves were long, daggering to points over the backs of my hands. The effect was like Nocturnia on the paranormal-news reports, a sort of elegant old-fashioned campiness. The guns rode low on my hips, the knives hidden in both the dress and the rig, the bullwhip coiled and hanging by my side. I knew I’d be chafing by the end of the night, and probably missing my messenger bag too.

  “Did Gabe courier the files?” I tried to sound businesslike. His eyes dropped again, appreciatively, and then he let it go, straightening and scooping up his staff. The bones cracked and rattled—he wasn’t quite as calm as he wanted me to think.

  For once, I let it go. Dante Valentine, restraining herself. I deserved a medal. Of course, as careful as I was being, he was too. Give him a gold star. Give him a medal too. Hell, give him a fucking parade.

  I told that snide little voice in my head to shut the fuck up.

  He nodded. “Of course. Over there.” He tipped his head.

  I found them lying atop an untidy stack of ancient leather-bound demonology books. I would have to visit the Library again soon, make an offering in the Temple overhead and go down into the dark vaults full of ancient books. Maybe this time I would find a demonology text that would give me a vital clue about what I was.

  I flipped the first file open, took a few pictures; the second and then the third. Christabel’s ruined face stared up from glossy laseprint paper, but there was a good shot of the twisted chalk glyphs. I would probably have to visit her apartment too; sooner rather than later to catch whatever traces of scent remained. If
nothing broke loose, that was. “I’m going to have to take the hover,” I muttered. “Gods.”

  “Why don’t you take a slicboard?” His tone was mischievous.

  “In this dress?” I hitched one shoulder up in a shrug.

  “Relax, baby. I ordered a hoverlimo.” The grin he wore infected my own face, I felt the corners of my eyes crinkle and my lips tilt up. How could he go from irritating me to making me smile? Then again, he liked to think he knew me all the way down to my psychopomp. “No reason not to go in style.”

  He sounded so easy I could have ignored the spiky, twisting darkness of his aura. Jace was furious, his anger kept barely in check. I laid the cloak down, the pictures on top of it, and for the first time crossed the room to stand next to him, silk whispering and rustling against my legs.

  His blue eyes dropped. Jace Monroe looked at the floor.

  I swallowed dryly, then reached up and laid my fingertips against his cheek. My nails, black and shiny, wet-looking as the lacquer of Japhrimel’s urn, scraped slightly. The contact rilled through me. My aura enfolded him, the spice of demon magic swirling around us both.

  Why must even an apology be a battle, with you? Japhrimel’s voice, again, stroking the deepest recesses of my mind. I had never thought it possible to be haunted by a demon. Of course, if he had truly been haunting me it might have been a relief, at least I wouldn’t be torturing myself with his voice. If he was haunting me, at least I would have some proof that somewhere, somehow, he still existed.

  And was thinking of me.

  “Jace?” My voice was husky. He shivered.

  Be careful, be very careful; you don’t know what it will do to him. The old voice of caution rose. Keeping him at arm’s length was an old habit; I still ached to touch him even as the thought made my stomach flutter—with revulsion, or desire, or some combination of the two, in what proportion I wasn’t sure.

  Oddly enough, I wanted to comfort him. He had suffered my silence and my throwing myself into bounties, playing my backup with consummate skill. He had turned into the honorable man I’d first thought he was.