Dante Valentine

by Lilith Saintcrow

  I was still making that sound when McKinley grabbed the back of my rig again. The train halted for one vertiginous second, and I realized what was happening as it fell away from underfoot and we launched out into space again. The hovertrain was heading down a sharp almost-vertical slope to plunge underground, probably a commuter line, and we were in freefall again as one imp leapt the sudden distance, slavering and champing, for my throat.

  Landed, hard, breath driven from my lungs again and something snapping in my right leg, a sudden sickening sheet of pain bolting through the clarity I’d just achieved. McKinley was cursing, low and steady in a hoarse broken tone. My hair stung my eyes, whipped into a tangled mass by the wind. I fetched up on my side, trying to get in enough breath to scream as the freight hover we’d landed on bounced, a sudden application of force controlled by its whining gyros. The imp vanished into the slipstream, not lucky enough to catch our trajectory.

  Oh, ow. Ouch. Agony rolled through the rage, sharpening it like a shot of vox sharpens a sniffer’s senses. Pulling everything into a different kind of clarity. “Sekhmet sa’es,” I moaned, the words filling my mouth like hot copper blood. Why does it take getting the shit beat out of me before I feel human again?

  “Don’t ever do that again!” McKinley yelled. “Goddammit! I’m trying to protect you!”

  You didn’t look in any shape to take on those guys, buddy boy. My right femur crunched with pain as the bone swiftly healed itself, demon metabolism running fiercely, heat blurring out from my skin. It actually felt cold with the wind howling as us, the freight hover moving at a good clip away from the trainline.

  Caracaz wheeled above and below, skyscraper spires piercing hot hazy sky, stretching down to pavement crawling with crowds below. Ambient Power stroked my skin, interference rising like steam to cloak my aura. This is better.

  This, I can work with. I coughed, swallowed a mouthful of something too warm and nauseatingly slick to be spit, and tested my right leg. It hurt like hell, but it was better. I made it up to hands and knees, the hilts jarring against my palms as the hover bounced again. The Knife hummed, a low satisfied sound that suddenly made me feel like emptying my stomach.

  Quit it, Danny. Puking won’t get you anywhere. I snapped a glance over my shoulder—the hovertrain had vanished. I wondered if the imps had survived.

  I got my feet underneath me, made it up. My right leg ached fiercely, the bone assaulted and unhappy. The scar sent another warm pulse of Power down my skin, and I was suddenly glad Japhrimel’s repair work on my shields had held up.

  And glad that neither imp nor spider-thing had been able to use Power against me.

  McKinley grabbed at my shoulder, and I controlled the twitch that could have buried the Knife in his guts. Twitchy, twitchy, Necromance. Mellow down easy. I came back fully into myself and felt suddenly… what was it?

  Whole. Cleansed, the fire of rage having burned something sticky and viscous away from me. I’d fought them off. I’d won.

  I liked the feeling. I wanted it to last.

  I tore myself out from under McKinley’s hand. “Watch it.”

  “We’ve got to get off this thing.” He checked the sky, his black hair lifting on the wind of our passage, cut now because the freight hover was in a downtown holding pattern.

  My eyes followed the loops and curves, hovers delicately woven into streams of unsnarled traffic. This one’s remote from the realtime AI controller, probably, since it didn’t change course when we thumped into it. At least, let’s hope so. My eyes stung, whipped by wind and hair. I should have tied it back, but how was I to know I’d go jumping off hovers?

  You should have guessed, Danny. Isn’t that how these things always go?

  “There.” McKinley pointed. A residential high-rise, with the hoverlane going directly over it. The fall was bad but not immense, and there was plenty of room for error.

  “You want me to break my leg again?” I sounded delighted, the remainder of the chilling little giggles spilling through my voice.

  “Better than the alternative,” he snapped. Dark circles had bloomed under his eyes, and he was chalk-pale. The violet glow around his left hand had subsided.

  “Guess so.” The Knife slid back into its sheath. “What about Vann and Lucas?”

  “They can take care of themselves. They’ll provide a distraction, it’s part of the plan.”

  “Plan? What plan?” There was a plan?

  “Standard for bodyguard duty. If we get separated, Vann goes low and fast and loud, drawing everyone away. I get the package and we rendezvous.” He coughed, a racking sound, and winced. His ribs didn’t look staved-in, as they had before. I wondered just how fast a Hellesvront agent healed.

  “Where?” I would have liked to know this, you know.

  “Where else? Hegemony Europa. Paradisse, actually. We’ve got a safe place there. That is, if it hasn’t been blown. That town’s always crawling with demons.” His lips pulled back from his teeth, a sharp delighted grin. “Don’t worry, Valentine. We’re going to keep you in one piece for our lord, whether you like it or not.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Paradisse started out as a Roma Taliano colony, back in the mists of time. During the era of the Religions of Submission Franje became a country, and the city grew like a pearl around the muddy banks of a river now running deep underground. Layer upon layer of history added itself to each street, each house, each tower.

  During the Awakening the Old Franje government—still not folded into the nascent Hegemony—threw open the city as a sanctuary for the emerging psionic community, sheltering them from the ravages of the Evangelicals of Gilead. Kochba bar Gilead had pronounced psions abominations, and the beginning years of the Awakening were marked by death camps and persecutions, rising to a fever-pitch during the bloodbath that led to the only tactical nuclear strike of the Seventy Days War, the bombing of the Vegas Territory. Paradisse, however, was shelter for any psion who could reach it, and the Awakening accelerated even as the Evangelicals choked to death on their own fanaticism, their vestigial gift to the social fabric the Ludder party and their xenophobic hatred of psions and paranormals—not to mention the lingering distaste of normals for anything psionic or paranormal.

  While her daughter Kebec is pearl and shimmer, Paradisse shines. The city throbs with light, glowing spires crisscrossed with moving walkways, hanging gardens, open-air cafés with climate control, each zipping hover gilded and each slicboard leaving a glittering trail in the effervescent air. Paradisse has been built on for centuries, and even though everything is Hegemony Europa now still the Old Franje shines through, in all its aesthetic and chauvinistic splendor. Aboveground, on the Brightside, Paradisse is often used in holovid representations of nirvana, and artists have wandered its upper byways for centuries, sketching and immortalizing.

  Underground, under the centuries of accumulated human habitation, is something else.

  The Darkside of Paradisse isn’t like the Jersey Core. It isn’t even like the Tank in Saint City. It’s Chill-fed urban blight, true, but down in the Darkside the rule is assassination, stealth, and debauchery. Some parts of the Darkside are mostly safe for regular citizens to go slumming; in those slices the bordellos and hash dens are strictly policed by Hegemony police regulars, Hegemony federal marshals, and a contingent of freelancers known as the Garde Parisen.

  The rest of the Darkside isn’t somewhere you want to go, even on a bounty. I wondered if the running sore of urban decay would begin to heal now that there was a cure for Clormen-13—Chill, the drug that caused so much death and destruction. It would have been nice, but if history has taught us one thing, it’s that people want to get high. The pharma companies would come up with more drugs to be abused, and the Mob would sell them. As Old Franje says it, plus ce change…

  That’s the problem with studying history. It will make even the sunniest optimist a cynic. For someone with my pessimistic bent, it gets downright fucking depressing.

  Two
days after escaping Caracaz during a bloody sunset—as stowaways on a trans-ocean freight hover, no less—I sat very still on a chair in the middle of a dark little hole of a room, my sword across my knees. There hadn’t even been a chance to find a scabbard for the blade, despite the fact that wandering around with naked steel was likely to draw notice.

  Outside the curtained window, the Darkside seethed.

  McKinley twitched the curtain aside, slowly, and peered out into a narrow street lit only by sodium-arc lamps. Down here under the rest of the city, it was always night. The immense press of centuries and dirt overhead threatened to trigger claustrophobia with every breath I took.

  I closed my eyes and breathed. The wards I’d put on the walls and window—subtle, gentle wards, meant only to warn me if someone was looking at the room—shivered uneasily. I wished I could shield the room like Japhrimel did, but that would have been like advertising my presence on the local holoboards.

  My shoulder was still numb. Now I knew that feeling. It meant Japh was in Hell, somewhere far away from the normal world. If anything could be said to be normal nowadays. The ban on Magi practicing hadn’t slowed down the ferment one bit, psions being notoriously edgy when denied the chance to practice their gifts. Magi were still showing up dead or going missing, and the Hegemony had its hands full with the confusion that was causing. Industrial espionage and theft was at an all-time high. The holonews was full of chaos and destruction.

  There were other whispers too—of things glimpsed on the street in broad daylight. Things not seen since the Awakening, when psionic and sorcerous talent flowered and the world was turned on its ear again, taking a collective jump into the future and struggling free of the Era of Submission.

  The underworld of bounty hunters and mercenaries was alive with the news that I was out there somewhere, and worth a fantastical sum dead or alive, if you could just figure out who to deliver me to. Information on my movements would fetch a fine price too.

  Since I hadn’t moved from this room since we got to Paradisse, I could only imagine what was going on. McKinley had made one run for supplies, not bringing back a scabbard, and returning pale and shaking just a little, smelling of demon and adrenaline. He brought back food, several bottles of distilled water, and two medikits. And he didn’t hold it against me when I met him at the door with a projectile gun, my finger tight on the trigger—and the Knife in my other hand.

  I was liking him more than I had, which still wasn’t much. Still, I slipped the sheathed Knife inside my bag. The throbbing whisper of the thing set me on edge, and I didn’t need more of a reason to lose my temper.

  I had plenty of reasons anyway, and a naked sword as well.

  I held on to the armrests. The room was in a rundown little boarding-house deep in one of the worst sections of the Darkside, enough pain and despair—not to mention illicit sex, spikes and eddies of violence, and just plain psychic noise—to almost cover up the stain of my aura on the landscape of ambient Power. It was barely furnished, just a cot and this chair, and a ramshackle table made of splinters and glue. McKinley had taken to sleeping on the floor, his hand on the hilt of a knife and his eyelids lifting whenever there was the slightest noise.

  I didn’t sleep.

  Instead, I closed my eyes and breathed, the red ribbon of flame sliding at the bottom of my conscious mind comforting. It was the same comfort I used to associate with the blue glow of Death, the rising crystal traceries of my god’s attention. My sword rang softly, and the Knife hummed in its sheath, responding to each twist and curve of rage. My fingers sometimes lifted and touched the back arc of the katana, warm metal responding to me like a purring cat.

  Waiting is the hardest part of anything, bounty hunt or combat run. The circular mental motion can be maddening. Add to that McKinley pacing, peering out the windows, or dozing lightly with one eye open, and you had a recipe for wearing my nerves down to bare threads.

  Not that there was much thread to wear off.

  I slid out of the chair, settling down cross-legged on the floor. My bag was flung near the chairlegs, a forlorn little canvas pile. I opened the top flap, laying my sword aside but within easy reach, and dug for a familiar hank of blue silk, knotted tightly.

  The fabric smelled of kyphii, gun oil, and faint nose-tingling human sweat, as well as the ever-present taint of demon spice. I had to pick at the knots for a while before they finally gave way, and my worn deck of tarot cards with their blue-and-black crosshatch backs lay in a nest of silk.

  I scooped them up, smoothing the silk out, and shuffled them with quick gunning snaps. McKinley tensed, turned his head to watch. His profile was almost ugly, a narrow nose and the bruising of exhaustion under his eyes, his mouth set like he tasted something bitter.

  I hadn’t touched my cards in a long time. When I’d been living with Japh in Toscano, there didn’t seem much need. And since he’d broken the news that Lucifer wanted my services, I hadn’t had time for any quiet reflection, let alone divination.

  I snap-shuffled them again, the sound very loud in the empty room. Echoes whispered off the walls. McKinley said nothing.

  The cards almost laid themselves out. Two of Blades. Death, with a skull’s grimace looking pained instead of its usual saucy smile. The Tower, screaming faces and shattered stones. The Devil card fluttered as I laid it down, despite the absolute stillness.

  The next card was blank.

  Well, that’s useless, Danny. It only tells you something you already know. My rings sparked, snapping as Power swirled in the charged air, something about to happen.

  “What is it?” McKinley’s soft whisper almost hid the low sound of a knife sliding from its sheath.

  I’ve seen these cards before. My eyes flicked toward the door just as it resounded with three hard knocks, shivering in its frame.

  I froze. Memory curled over inside my skull, past sliding seamlessly into the present. McKinley ghosted between me and the door, his left hand suddenly aglow with violet light. My right hand curled around the sword’s hilt, yet I didn’t try to push myself up from the floor.

  I smelled musk and baking bread, and I thought I knew who it was. I didn’t reach for my bag and the Knife’s almost-audible pulsing.

  Another cascade of knocking, fast light polite raps. McKinley glanced back at me, black eyes narrowed.

  Suddenly I heard a rapping, as of someone gently tapping, tapping at my chamber door. I swallowed, hard. The Knife’s humming rattled against my hip. “You might as well answer that.” If they’re knocking, they haven’t attacked yet.

  He eased forward, weight balanced catlike. “Be ready.”

  For what? But I only nodded. My hair fell forward into my eyes, I blew it irritably away with a sharp exhale.

  McKinley edged toward the door. He was four steps from it when the knob turned, the locks groaning sharply before they flipped, one by one. It creaked theatrically as it opened, slowly, revealing the dirty hallway outside and a slice of weak golden light from one unshattered bulb.

  There, in the doorway, stood a demon.

  CHAPTER 28

  You’d better come in.” Wonder of wonders, I even sounded steady.

  Eve stepped over the lintel delicately, like a stray cat. Her pale hair caught all the available light, a torch in darkness. Behind her, a strange-familiar face swam out of the darkness of the hall. Anton Kgembe’s hair was damp, beads of water clinging to it, and the star sapphire in the hilt of his scimitar winked. My cheek burned—his tat moved under his skin, the faintly fluorescing dye adding a highlight to the gleam of his eyes.

  McKinley lifted his left hand, the violet light streaming in weird geometric patterns from his fingertips. His knees loosened, and if Eve had come for me—or so much as pitched her weight forward at the wrong moment—I think he might have actually tried to kill her.

  I never liked you much before, sunshine. But I’m beginning to change my mind.

  They came fully into the room, step by step, and I almost wasn
’t surprised. “McKinley. Close the door.” Who was the person using my voice? She sounded almost prim. She also sounded like someone you didn’t want to fuck with.

  He gave me a look that suggested I was a few bananas short of a full sundae. “Valentine—”

  “Shut the door.” I made my hand unloose with an effort of will. He moved, the geometrics streaming from his fingers, and the door swung slowly closed. “Kgembe.”

  He bowed slightly. The knives strapped to his rig looked well-oiled and loved, and he eschewed plasguns for a pair of serviceable 9 mm projectile Smithwessons. Just my type of gun.

  I braced myself. “Eve.”

  “Dante.” She tilted her head a little, and I got the idea she would have curtsied. Her hair rubbed against itself, much rougher than the silk of Japhrimel’s. She was cool, calm, and clean, in a long deep-indigo Chinese-collared shirt and tailored khakis. Low blue Verano heels clicked slightly as she took another two steps forward, seemingly not noticing McKinley’s immediate move to put himself between us. “Mother.”

  The word itself was salt in the wound. I shook it away and rose, not quite as gracefully as a demon, but at least I didn’t fall over. “How did you find me?”

  “We share a bond.” Eve’s smile broadened, just a little. It was difficult to look at her.

  I couldn’t look away. And I suppose having that Magi right there, the one that opened a door for Japh, didn’t hurt. “Let’s just get to the point. What do you want?” And do you know I have the Knife? Or half of it, anyway?

  A shrug, her shoulder lifting and dipping gracefully. “What I have always wanted. To survive. And not so incidentally, my freedom. Surely you can understand.”

  “Even if you have to lie to me to get it.” I tasted bitterness with the words. The room rattled a bit under the lash of my tone. Her smell wrapped around me, cajoling, teasing, and I found with a burst of relief that I didn’t respond to it. The black hole in my head stirred uneasily.