Dante Valentine

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Her bright-blue eyes actually dropped. She looked, of all things, ashamed. Like a kid caught cheating on a mentaflo test.

  Was it another trick?

  “Would you have believed me if I looked like this?” Eve spread her hands, long supple fingers hiding her claws. “What could I have done? Tell me.”

  Guess we’ll never find out, will we. I didn’t say it. Instead, I studied her face, searching for some echo of myself in the lines of demon bones, the suppleness of her skin, the gaunt beauty.

  There was no human left in Eve. Had there ever been?

  It was burned away. In Hell.

  I could have hated her for it, except I knew what it felt like. I’d felt that burning myself. Did she ever regret it?

  Was she capable of regretting it, now?

  How long would it be before I was incapable of regretting the same thing?

  No. Stubbornness rose up inside me. I decide. I’m human. Wherever it counts, wherever I have enough of me left to make it, I’m human.

  Hollow words or not, at least it sounded good. “Where’s Leander?” I didn’t shift my weight, but I might as well have. The words were ready for war, my tone a lot less than conciliatory.

  “I don’t know. I had enough to do rescuing this human.” Eve took a half-step back, avoiding McKinley and keeping an avenue of escape open. Her gasflame-blue gaze flicked toward the darkened window, the Darkside pressing against dusty plasglass. Kgembe didn’t look in the least discouraged, or even afraid. The smell of his fear was muted under the screen of Eve’s perfume. Still, his gaze settled on McKinley, and I could have sworn the Magi was daring the Hellesvront agent to look at him.

  Did you abandon Leander, Eve? Did you even stop to think before you did? What about Velokel? I discarded the questions as useless. Wherever the Necromance was now, I couldn’t help him. I had my hands full.

  I’d feel guilty about it later. Later, later, later. “You’re here, you must want something. What do you want me to do?”

  “The Eldest?” Her tongue darted out, smoothed her shapely lips. If I’d still been dazzled by her resemblance to Doreen, I might have been distracted.

  That’s what you’re actually after, I bet. My shoulders dropped a trifle. “You can find me, but not him? Oh, that’s right. You’ve got a pet Magi there. Which side of the street is he working?”

  The Magi tensed, but still didn’t speak, his liquid dark eyes on the hand clasping my swordhilt. Why was he looking at me like that? He was hanging around with demons far more dangerous than I ever would be.

  Then again, he was a Left Hander. The thought that maybe I’d end up worshiping the Unspeakable myself if I kept breaking my Word was chilling, to say the least. Could he tell?

  “We share a link, Dante. I did not lie about that.” Eve almost seemed to shrink, a little girl in a demon’s body. McKinley moved restlessly, straining against a leash. Dust shifted against the room’s plain, dirty surfaces, reminding me of the choking grit in a city full of shattered white walls.

  I’m not even going to dignify that with a response. “Get to the point, Eve. What do you want?”

  I didn’t think it would make any difference. But she opened her mouth, and she told me.

  Silence like dark wine filled the room. McKinley’s eyes widened, a ring of white around the dark irises like a spooked horse’s. I didn’t blame him.

  “You want me to what?” If we’d had any neighbors in the adjoining rooms, they might have heard my shriek.

  So much for dignity. Fudoshin rang gently, the steel responding to my voice. It hadn’t lit with blue fire yet, but the quiver in my wrist spoke volumes.

  Kgembe folded his arms, one eyebrow lifting. Like he didn’t believe I was making such a big deal about it.

  Eve still looked very small, and very young. And very much like a demon, her eyes the brightest thing in the drab, dull room. “I need time, both to gather my allies and plan. You can provide me with that time, and enough confusion to distract anyone we need to. No Magi has your power, by virtue of what you are—enough Power to do what must be done. I need your help, Dante.”

  Oh, ouch. The way into my psyche, the key precious few of my human friends had known about. I need.

  Not want. Need.

  I am a sucker for being needed. Jace had known that. Doreen had too. And so had Gabe.

  Did Japhrimel know? It was unlikely. He didn’t have the first clue about what made me tick. Maybe that was why he loved me.

  Maybe that’s why I loved him.

  The realization hit me between the eyes like a projectile bullet. Eve needed my help, certainly. But I could help Japhrimel, maybe, too. By doing something, not just waiting like a lost suitcase, yearning to be picked up and rescued.

  Play their games back at them, Dante. See how well you can.

  Besides, no human Magi could do what Eve needed. It would take plenty of sheer Power—the same Power that thundered through the mark on my shoulder. Maybe it was time to use it instead of moaning about how different it made me.

  I took a deep breath, filling my nose with the musk-sweet spice of Androgyne and the dry demon-tang of Hellesvront agent. Eve might need me, or she might be using me as a distraction—just as Lucifer had.

  But Japhrimel definitely needed me right now, for once. If this would create a little chaos to cover his path, I was all for it. I was all for taking back some control in this mess.

  “All right.” My swordblade dipped, my wrist relaxing. “Tell me how. Use small words so I can understand.”

  McKinley actually choked, his pale cheeks turning crimson; I glared at him and he shut his mouth over a protest I didn’t want to hear.

  “Anton can explain much of it, I can fill in any gaps in his knowledge.” A flash of something hard and delighted bolted through Eve’s eyes, almost too quickly for me to identify. “It is not so difficult, once one knows how.” Her hands relaxed, and she smiled, a thin small cruel curve of her sculpted lips.

  She still looked nothing like Doreen, and just a little like Lucifer. But that tiny smile, fleeting as it was, was still so familiar a chill touched my spine.

  Maybe she was my daughter after all.

  McKinley stared at the empty hall for a few moments, then swept the door closed. The hinges squealed in protest before he locked it. He stayed where he was for a moment, his left hand braced against the knob. “Are you insane?” His shoulders dropped, shaking under his torn shirt.

  Do you really want to know? I looked down at the tarot cards scattered around my booted feet. My heel rested on the Devil card, my weight pitched forward in combat-readiness. I sank back down from the balls of my feet, my boots creaking as I shifted, and my heel ground sharply into the floor. “McKinley.” Dear gods. I sound like Japhrimel.

  “I’d really like to know what the hell you’re thinking, Valentine. Jaf should have been back by now. He’s gone and we’re fucked, and you just made it worse by agreeing to openly throw down the gauntlet.” He leaned into the door, wood groaning sharply. Outside our bolt-hole, the Darkside inhaled, catching its breath before the plunge.

  The gauntlet? Like the cuff I used to wear, saying I was Lucifer’s errand-girl? I ground my heel down even more sharply as the thought made my stomach twinge, the darkness inside my head revolving on oiled bearings, silent and deadly. Okay, Danny. Think your way out of this one. My brain began to work again. “Please tell me you have a way to get in touch with Vann.”

  CHAPTER 29

  The Il deCit is now underground, and the spires of Notra Dama melt into the landfill top of the cavern of Plásse Cathedral. Unlike most of the Darkside, the Il deCit runs with crimson light—from low-heat sublamps during the night and the sublamps plus incandescents during the “day,” or whenever the city’s central AI tells the lamps it’s between dawn and dusk on the surface. The Il is also one of the bigger thoroughfares, so mini-airbikes and slicboards are popular, the air unsteady and trembling with antigrav wash from reactive paint on the boards and bike
s.

  The sk8s in the Darkside are different than slictribes in most other parts of the world, being lethal and filthy instead of just clannish and unhygienic. A gang of Darkside slictribers can strip a corpse in seconds or a live victim in under a minute; citizens are just lucky the organ trade isn’t on fire in Hegemony Europa like it is in, say, Nuevo Rio.

  We crouched in the shadows of a refuse-strewn alley. There’s really no smell like a main street in the Darkside. Maintenance ’bots come through at regular intervals, but the constant ambient temperature and the volatile hoverwash make it a breeding ground for all sorts of smells, including the effluvia of humanity.

  We melded out of the shadows and crossed the street, McKinley flanking me. The crowd was thick but not overly so, and nobody went up the steps of the Notra Dama without having serious business. As soon as it became obvious we were heading for the old temple, the milling pedestrians—Darksiders and regular Paradissians out for a night of slumming fun—suddenly avoided contact with us, a path opening without comment.

  I wished it didn’t feel so depressingly normal.

  Notra Dama rose broken-toothed and slump-shouldered but still beautiful, vibrating with uneasy energy. If Paradisse had a heart, it was probably the Floating Arc Triomphe, retrofitted with hovercushions and a popular tourist destination.

  But if the Darkside had a pulsing heart, it was the Lady, as the Notra Dama was known, an ancient Christer temple slumped into the rubble and wreckage, waiting for the next turn of the great wheel. She’d seen pagan sacrifices and the rise and fall of the Religions of Submission; she was where a small group of psions had barricaded themselves during one of the last battles of the Seventy Days War. Old Franje had tried desperately to shield paranormals and psions, granting them sanctuary and parrying both the diplomatic and the military maneuvers of the Evangelicals of Gilead, who demanded the return of any escaped North Merican citizens for internment in the death camps.

  I shivered. Hegemony Albion and Old Franje had both been horrifically bombed during the War. The first and last nuclear strike, resulting in the Vegas Waste, had been in North Merica… but in Hegemony Europa, people had long memories. Notra Dama had taken a direct hit, and sometimes, it was said, you could hear the screams of the dying.

  I didn’t doubt it. An old temple built at the juncture of five ley lines feeding energy into the city’s gravitational center was a prime place for ghostflits. She really deserved her own collegia of Ceremonials to drain her charge and restore her, but down here in the dark it wasn’t a good idea.

  Psions tend to go a little nuts underground.

  My boots clicked gently on the steps. At the top the great doors hung, creaking slightly on their ancient hinges as currents of Power threaded through the physical structure of the building. The Lady was restless tonight, maybe reading my intentions—or perhaps just restless because the presence of demons made the entire city shiver like a hooker watching a knife in a pimp’s hand.

  Like a Knife made out of wood, Danny? The voice of strained hilarity had a particularly jolly tone tonight. The Knife in your bag? Not going to do you much good in there.

  I pushed the doors open, scanning the interior of the temple through a haze of Power. To OtherSight, white-hot snakes crawled and writhed over the floor, crackling up the columns and walls, dripping from the ruined choirloft and the magnificent chipped stonework and fading frescoes.

  It was even better than I’d hoped, the magickal equivalent of a fallout zone. It would keep me hidden in the first stage of the work I intended to perform, and when I drained the ambient Power to fuel the spell it would make a huge stinking noise—a noise noticed by every psion and probably every demon in a good three-hundred-mile radius.

  “It just doesn’t get any better than this,” I muttered, shoving my sword into the loop on my rig. My voice rang off stone, fell back at me, given fresh echoes by the buzzing vibration of Power.

  Small shuffling noises edged around us as pale transparencies of ghostflits rode the currents of Power, some of them silently screaming, others just drifting, wearing out their chains until they found by accident the way into the clear rational light of What Comes Next. The flits were a good sign, gathering here where there was enough Power to bathe them in something approximating borrowed flesh, even though my skin chilled to See them, cold breath on my back and wariness rising to my nape.

  Necromances don’t like flits much. They congregate in nightclubs, some old uncared-for temples, anywhere there’s enough Power, instability, and heat to give them a simulacrum of life. Back in the days before the Awakening, those gifted with the ability to see the dead were often pursued by flits, and battered into insane asylums and suicide by the harassment. It technically isn’t harassment, since flits are just confused and can’t understand why normals can’t see them… but it’s still pretty damn uncomfortable, and before the Awakening the training to keep mental and emotional borders clear and firm to ward off the confused dead wasn’t available in any systematic way.

  I had to breathe through my mouth, trying not to smell the ripe fresh odor, hitting the back of my throat like a kick of Crostine rum back when I was human, spilling through my bloodstream in a hot wave. Power stroked along my ragged shields, almost matching the soft numbness in my left shoulder. I pushed the door closed, scanning the entire place. Not a soul except the rats in the walls and the flits, a few of them taking notice of the glittering sparkle in my aura that meant Necromance.

  Do you know what you’re doing, Danny?

  I ignored the voice of reason and made a slow circuit of the whole place.

  I checked the door in the east quadrant, behind a screening pile of rubble and garbage that smelled unwholesome in the extreme. It opened up into a narrow alley excavated between Notra Dama and the sloping tenement next door. At the end of that alley, at the bottom of a well that went up to the third level—that is, three discrete levels down from the surface, if the Darkside could be said to have actual official levels— the slim shape of an airbike was a thin metal gleam. It hadn’t been touched, the thread-thin warding I’d laid on it undisturbed.

  “All right,” I whispered. Turned to McKinley. “It’s still there. Now are you happy?”

  He nodded. “Ecstatic.”

  I had to suppress the urge to snort. “I wish we’d been able to find Vann and Lucas.” Not to mention Leander. I hope he’s still alive, federal agent or not.

  He pulled his lips in, his shoulders tensing. “They can take care of themselves. You’re who I’m worried about.”

  Maybe you should be. I’m about to do something insane. “You might want to take notes. You’re going to see a Greater Work of magick performed tonight.” And if it doesn’t work, maybe we’ll both die in here.

  “Are you really going to do this?” He took up his position by the door, his hands shaken out and loose. The violet glow around his left hand brightened, maybe in response to the ambient Power. I wondered just what exactly that metallic coating on his flesh meant, decided I didn’t want to know.

  “I said I would. Eve’s right—this will buy us some time and create enough confusion to keep us in the game a bit longer. Not only that, but Japhrimel needs some cover.” My throat went dry, my heart picking up its pace against my ribs. “If it doesn’t work, at the very least it’ll make a lot of noise and distract a bunch of demons.”

  “Or the Prince will find you.” His pupils had swollen in the dim light, crimson-tinted from the sublamps outside. He sounded like I’d just informed him of my intention to put on petticoats and sing the entire score of Magi: The Musical. With sound effects. A rancid giggle rose up in my throat, was strangled, and fell back down.

  Thanks, McKinley. You know, I might have forgotten about that if you hadn’t reminded me. “Which is why Eve can’t do this. If Lucifer or one of his stooges grabs her…” I swallowed the rest of the sentence. I wasn’t about to let that happen.

  “If he shows up we might both die. I’m supposed to look after y
ou.”

  I know. But we’re both out of our depth here. It’s only a matter of time before someone other than Eve finds me. I shrugged. “I’m going to help Japh and Eve at the same time, McKinley. You want to try to stop me, all you’ll get is a bellyful of steel. You want to test me on this?”

  His pause was gratifying, at least. “Jaf can take care of himself. And she—”

  Quit stalling, Danny. “This isn’t under discussion, sunshine. You want to leave, there’s the door.” I turned away, my bootheel scraping the ancient stone of the floor. There was a clear space in front of the altar, and I flipped open my bag as I strode away, around the mound of rubbish that would give us some cover if we had to retreat firing. My fingers rooted through the chaos—spare ammo, leather-wrapped wood pulsing with its own obscene life, a plasglass container of cornmeal still miraculously unhurt, and the small jar of salt.

  What I really needed was the chunk of consecrated chalk. My pulse began to hammer, my mouth tasting sour, and I inhaled a long deep breath as I stepped back out into the soaring space of the ruined temple and surveyed the mounds of garbage.

  It isn’t the location that matters, Danny. Magick is a state of mind. Get moving.

  “Fuck,” I whispered in lieu of a prayer, as my fingers closed on the chalk.

  The sorcerer’s circle is an invention of seventeenth-century magick, but it’s still a useful innovation. A psion has to be ready to deal with nasty things outside the charmed border of a circle, but as a container for magickal force, the circle is without equal.

  I didn’t precisely hurry, but I didn’t take my time either. I’d bought a bottle of Crostine rum at a tiny Darkside shop run by an anemic-looking normal woman, and the pack of synth-hash cigarettes sat with it at the north point of the circle. I made it double, runes from the Nine Canons sketched between the outer and inner rings, each drawn from Magi-trained memory sharp and crisp against cracked stone. Between them, the twisted fluid glyph scored into my flesh writhed, doodled so many times I could have traced it in my sleep.