Dante Valentine

by Lilith Saintcrow

  As if there was anyone here.

  For all I knew, nobody was here… but just because I felt like I should sneak around to avoid Mirovitch’s hounds didn’t mean it was a bad idea to exercise a little caution.

  I’m being eaten alive by my own childhood. Gods above. Why me? The answer came in a flash. Why not? Who, after all, was better equipped than me?

  I reached the top of the hill and hunched down instinctively, the edges of my shields roughening. Dust, offal, magick, aftershave, chalk, and leather. I retreated, almost as if scalded, gasping and dropping flat as the wall of magick passed overhead. He was scanning the grounds.

  Well, now I know he’s here. I tried to remember if I had any consecrated chalk in my bag. Then it occurred to me that I was doing exactly what a scared teenager would do—hiding, and waiting for Lourdes to find and trap me like a rabbit.

  Which brought up another glaring hole in my plan. I didn’t even have one. I was operating on a sort of half-ass instinct I hadn’t used since I was twelve. A miserable instinct that was just what any stupid kid would use. The fact that it was impossible to plan for something like this didn’t exonerate me from feeling a little dumb.

  Time to start thinking, Danny! A whisper that sounded like Jace’s in my ear, hot breath touching my cheek, warm fingers on my nape. It felt so bloody real I gasped, throwing myself down and rolling, instinctively throwing up a flare of Power that stained the hillside crimson for a moment.

  Well, I just blew any chance I had of secrecy. I made it to my feet and bolted away at a different angle. This would take me directly to the Headmaster’s House, keeping me below the sight line of the hill.

  I heard boots crunching on gravel, which told me two things: that he was on the other side of the hill and behind me, and also that he had been at the front gate or in the dormitories.

  For a moment, I considered veering up and engaging him head-on; but I was already running soundless as an owl. I heard the footsteps on gravel slow and strained my ears, suddenly and, for once, blessing my demon-acute senses.

  A short yell of pain and the sound of something falling, hitting the ground hard. Then a mad gravel-crunching scramble, and footsteps on grass. I didn’t stop, came around the side of the hill’s breast, and found myself faced with the track leading up to the Headmaster’s House.

  Polyamour came this way, with a nine-year-old girl and Keller. Bringing them to Mirovitch. My gorge rose. The track was paved, and I ran over it using all the speed and silence my new body could give me.

  I had just come over the slight rise, leaping over a pothole, when I heard a hissing crackle. I threw myself aside and the bolt flung past me, crackling and spitting as it went, and buried itself in the Headmaster’s House.

  The prim, two-story neo-Victorian was clearly abandoned, plaswood over the windows. Uncertain foggy light showed great cracks in the peeling paint—the same kind of leprous blue light I’d seen in Sukerow’s apartment. Only this time, the blue light spread, crackling and hissing. I wondered for a split second if the unhealthy looking glow would give me a radiation burn. It certainly looked like the diseased glow of a coremelt.

  The explosion was deafening. I ended up lying in the long grass on the side of the road, the shockwave smashing me down, a warm trickle of blood coming from my nose.

  “Plenty more where that came from,” I heard from my right, down the hill in the bushes. The bolt had streaked past me from my right, which meant that he’d been scrambling behind me.

  The fléchette, he’s probably tracking the fléchette.

  And the last necklace that I had in my pocket.

  “Who are you?” The wheezing, slightly asthmatic voice came again. Chills worked up my spine, spilled down my arms. It sounded odd, strangely distorted, as if passed through a synthfilter—but I knew that voice. My entire body went cold and strained against shock at the sound, my fingers digging into the earth, the smell of crushed wet grass and damp earth rising around me and warring with the heady, spicy fragrance of demon.

  The Headmaster’s House was burning merrily, orange flames instead of blue now, casting a livid light up into the fog. I had only a few seconds before he crested the rise and saw me.

  Then I heard a horrible, chilling scream. “No! NO! Stop it! STOP IT!” This voice was different, a baritone, with the unmistakable tang of Skinlin. I only heard one set of footsteps—but then I heard a thrashing, like a fight.

  “Whoever you are, run! Run for your life!”

  I intended to run, but not for my life.

  I intended to run for his.

  “—down,” Mirovitch hissed. “And stay down. In your place, boy.”

  I didn’t stick around to hear more. I ran.

  CHAPTER 35

  I suppose the last place either Mirovitch or Keller would have expected me to go was the cafeteria. There was a wall of boarded-up windows on one side, two lone leftover tables stacked against the wall, and insulation hung from the ceiling in long swathes. It was tactically exposed, and I’d had to break open a door to get in here—and if the sound of screeching metal and my own jagged breathing didn’t bring Mirovitch, what I was going to do next would.

  I was only a few steps in before my foot came down on something soft. My sword whipped out, and I found myself looking at an innocuous sleeping bag, lying tangled on the floor. The smell of canned beef soup hung in the air, and I smelled candle wax as well. Candle wax and unwashed human—and the cold, fetid reek of Mirovitch, dust and magick and feces and chalk and aftershave.

  I’d found a lair. The trouble was, I wasn’t sure of what.

  I dug in my bag with one trembling hand. My sword glowed blue. My frantic fingers couldn’t find any chalk, though I knew I had some. I could almost feel time winding down, the clocksprings of whatever was going to happen ticking away, closer and closer, rising through the water to sink its teeth into my thrashing legs.

  I pulled my hand out of my bag and took a deep breath flavored with human and not-so-human scents, my own smoky demon smell suddenly strong as a shield in my nostrils. Reached into my pocket, fingers closing around the fléchette in its plasilica sheath.

  The touch of cold metal shocked me back into some kind of sense. I crouched down on the floor in the middle of the caf, a swordsman’s crouch, my blade held out to one side, the fléchette in my left hand. What do I need chalk for? I’m part demon.

  The circle swirled in the air, dust scorching as the fire in me rose, whipcracking in small, controlled bursts, a tattoo of Power burning into the concrete under the linoleum. It took bare seconds. By the time it was done, I had a tolerable approximation of a double circle scored around me with red-glowing Power—and between the two circles, the subtly altered shapes of the Feeder glyphs Kellerman Lourdes had created writhed. Every candle Lourdes had placed in here burst into flame, suddenly alive with fire, their glow warm and welcoming. The fléchette began to hum, metal glowing, heating up in my hand. My pocket, the one holding the leftover spade necklace, began to smoke. I didn’t have a hand left to fish it out, so I just crouched, on guard.

  One of the plaswood windows blew in. Then another. Another. Splinters skidded across the floor.

  Silence descended. Here was where it would end.

  Do you believe in Fate, Danny Valentine?

  I gulped down air, the three phantom scars on my back alive. The vanished brand along my lower-left buttock began to ache, dully at first, and then with increasing pain. A curl of smoke drifted up from my pocket. I waited.

  The door I’d wrenched open creaked as it was pulled wide, then ripped off its hinges. And into the cafeteria shambled Kellerman Lourdes.

  Now that I saw him up close, I vaguely remembered him as a tall, gawky, acne-pocked Skinlin, always on the periphery of whatever activity was being conducted. His career at Rigger had been singularly free of rumors and whispers. It was as if nobody noticed him at all. The invisible man.

  Part of the puzzle became clear as I studied him. He stepped into the
caf and watched me, dead dark eyes sparking with blue pinpricks, his thick wattled cheeks quivering ever so slightly.

  “You were a Feeder already.” Breathless, I sounded like I was fourteen again.

  And scared.

  That was why he’d been invisible; and that was why he could get close to Mirovitch that fateful night with Polyamour and Dolores. He’d had a Feeder’s camouflage; it was no use being a psychic vampire if you shouted it to the heavens. No, they were all-but-invisible, especially to children, which was what made them so bloody dangerous. In a normal Hegemony psi school he would have been tested, treated, and more than likely saved, free to live out a normal life as a psion. But in Mirovitch’s kingdom he was left untreated… and so he used that camouflage to kill Mirovitch with the others, probably taking Mirovitch’s death into his own psyche and sealing his own fate as a Feeder—or even worse, a Feeder’s mule. A physical body for the ka of the dead Headmaster to ride.

  He stared at me fixedly, his face slack and wooden. Then something swirled in the bottom of his eyes, crawled for the surface, and tried to speak. “You’re… not… one. Of. Them.” He cocked his head to the side, his throat swelling as he wrestled for control of his own voice. “Get. Get out. Out of here. I can’t… hold…”

  “He’s riding you,” I realized out loud. “You’re a Feeder’s mule. But you kept him down for ten years.” I felt a thin burst of satisfaction at having guessed right, along with a flare of guilt for how stupid I’d been. It was all plain as day now.

  “I can’t—” Kellerman Lourdes gasped, spittle flying from his lips. He twisted, hunching down, some terrible battle being waged for control of his body. “I can’t stop him now. You… run…”

  Then his head jerked forward, like a snake’s quick whipping strike. The fléchette in my left hand abruptly cooled, the cold stinging my fingers far more than heat would have. I held on, grimly. Waiting.

  Then blue light bloomed from the circle of glyphs I’d scratched into the floor. The necklace, still in my pocket, fell as I shifted. It had burned a hole straight through the Kevlar-reinforced canvas of Jace’s coat. It fell, the chain writhing like a live thing, and hit the floor with an oddly musical tinkle.

  The circle cracked. Blue light flared like a thunderclap, and I saw Kellerman Lourdes’s entire body jerk as ectoplasm streamed from mouth and nose and eyes and ears, a coughing mass of it. I dove back as Mirovitch’s ka streaked for me, its inhuman hands turned into venom-dipped claws. Only this was not Mirovitch, the stoop-shouldered tweedy Feeder Headmaster who liked to prey on children.

  This was the ka, grown monstrous and foul, Mirovitch seen through the eyes of a child, with claws and fangs and the leprous blue-burning eyes of a closet-hiding goblin.

  I screamed, scrambling back, forgetting I was holding a sword. The backlash of the circle’s cracking and breaking from inside poured up my spine and jerked a coughing yell from my throat as the Headmaster descended on me, his claws raking my belly, one catching in my ribs. A hot gush of demon blood boiled out, I convulsed, and Mirovitch dove for my open mouth, gagging reeking ectoplasm forcing down my throat.

  CHAPTER 36

  Gagging. Retching. Agony, as the claws tore in through my skin and organs, viscera spilling in a hot stream, my eyes bugging out as everything behind them pushed like depressurization.

  “Student Valentine is called to the Headmaster’s Office immediately.”

  Walking, every step a dread drumbeat, up the wooden stairs. Mirovitch’s smile as his dry papery hand landed on my shoulder. We’ve got something special for those who break the rules today, Miss Valentine. Meeting Roanna’s eyes, feeling the sick thump of knowledge behind my breastbone. She’d told her social worker, and Mirovitch had found out.

  Jerking, crackling, her body on the fence, Mirovitch’s fingers sinking into my arm as he dragged me back into Hell… and the brand, glowing red hot. Leather against my wrists as I screamed until my voice broke, after he was finished with me and the red-hot iron burned my skin as his semen trickled down my thighs; the chair’s hard slat in my midriff, unable to breathe, the sound of his papery laughter filling the universe as that last shameful memory crashed out from behind the locked door—the door I’d closed and locked when I left Rigger Hall, the door that had to close so I could go on living. Surviving.

  Fingers. In my head. Scraping, tearing, ripping. Burning.

  No wonder Christabel couldn’t be brought back—

  The alien thing in my mind recoiled. That thought wasn’t part of the feedback loop that would keep me helpless while it destroyed me. I grabbed onto it with the last shipwrecked vestige of my strength, sank my mental teeth into its hide, and began to fight.

  Polyamour, tilting her head so slightly. “You learn early that your body betrays you—it’s your mind that has to stay impregnable. Your soul. To have that filthy old maggot fingering inside your head…”

  It howled with rage, this thing bent on rape and destruction, and tore into me all the more savagely, battering down even more mental doors, tearing great gaping holes in my psyche.

  And I fought back.

  Two dark eyes, the last flaring of emerald light in them. Green eyes in a saturnine face, the demon’s mouth warm as he mouthed my neck, my shudder against him, spent, his murmur in my ear.

  Memory, twisting and whirling, Putchkin Roulette with the inside of my head, the burning as he forced his way in, battering down doors, bursting locks, trying to find… what?

  “Even the loa can’t force a woman’s heart…” If I hadn’t been part-demon, I would never have heard his murmur. “I had to give it up, Danny. I had to. For you.”

  It screamed, recoiling from that memory too. Of course, the memory of Jace was underlaid with a clean pure well of emotion, shame and love and guilt twisted together but still mine, still a source of strength, inimical to the unholy thing. I had weapons, if I could just reach them, find them, use them. Good things, anything.

  Smoke belched up, the unholy sick blue light forcing its way into me, lesions cracking on my skin, demon blood boiling, trying to heal me.

  A convulsive effort. I was winning, if I could only remember.

  Remember, Christabel keened. Remember everything.

  Remember Jace’s face, sleeping and peaceful in the bed you shared with him so long ago. Remember Doreen’s soft touch, the light in her eyes. Remember Lewis’s hand in yours, so strong, so sure. Remember the books he gave you, each one telling you that you were precious because he trusted you. Remember Japhrimel’s last sigh as he sank down on your body. Remember reading under the covers with your heart in your mouth and your breath stale in your throat. Remember Gabe, doing for you what you could not do for yourself. Remember Eddie, holding your shoulders, remember Japhrimel throwing himself between you and Santino, determined to protect you. Remember, Dante.

  Remember everything.

  My fingers tightened on the fléchette. I gagged. Black spots over my vision. Passing out. Oxygen… even a demon needed some kind of air. And then what he did to my mind would be done to my body.

  —fucker flayed her alive—

  Christabel’s raw scream, the shattering of tiles as she lunged for me. No wonder—even Death might not take this agony from me.

  But I would win. As long as I could remember.

  Remember, Dante. Remember everything.

  I flung the fléchette as I fell backward, the thing that was Mirovitch forcing its way into my mouth and nose, ramming its way into my mind. I struggled, the memories fading as I tried desperately to keep them, to keep them and to stand, to endure.

  The splinter of metal and Power pierced the wall of blue glow, shone like a shard of ice, and glowed as it bulleted in a perfect arc—

  —and buried itself in Kellerman Lourdes’ neck. Kill the mule and the Feeder should die, please, Anubis, please…

  It was the only way I knew of to kill a ka. I would win, if I could just hold on.

  If I could just remember what mattered. />
  Falling, then. Falling, falling, fell, concrete smacking my head and back, its claws twisting in my belly but I could not scream, it was in my throat, pushed past my gag reflex, forcing its way in, my nose burning and stretching, it was tearing at my jeans with one probing finger of ectoplasm, it’ll get in any way it can, convulsing, darkness not just spots but a glaucous sheet closing over my vision.

  Remember, Dante. Remember. Christabel’s voice, not insane with an apparition’s flat terrible finality, but as if she stood next to me, a skinny girl with bruised knees and folded arms, terrible knowledge in her childlike dark eyes. Remember. Remember.

  I could remember nothing but one last despairing cry. The name that beat behind my heart, inside my head, the prayer I had left when all else failed.

  Japhri—

  My left shoulder suddenly crunched with an agony even greater, as if my left arm was being torn out of its socket one hard millimeter at a time. I managed a strangled noise past the suffocating thing stuffing itself down my throat, black demon blood pattering on concrete, and then the world exploded.

  Fire. Red fire.

  I heard a sound like thunder smashing the jars of the universe, every star exploding and raining fiery destruction, the grinding of an earthquake and the crackle of ice calving on every mountainside at once. Then blessed cold air seared my throat.

  Searing. It hurt almost as much as what Mirovitch had done, my body blindly scrabbling for survival, every demon-tainted, demon-strong cell fighting to live. The wet tearing sound as my battered viscera spilled back into my stomach cavity, bones crackling as the scream bubbled past ectoplasm in my throat, a burst of Power forcing its way along my skin.

  Something had happened.

  Remember, Dante. Remember. Christabel’s voice, grown huge, a bell filling the world, as she stared at me with her dark eyes. Remember. Remember.

  I rolled weakly onto my side, coughing, choking the smell of dust, chalk, and aftershave out of my mouth, blowing out through my nose, slick egg-white gobbets of ectoplasm streaming away and rotting in seconds. I retched again, but didn’t throw up.