Redemption Alley

by Lilith Saintcrow

  I knew them all, and drew deeper into the shadows under the tree. The chaplain’s voice reached me in fits and starts, carried by the faint wind from the river, smelling of greenness and mineral water.

  There was no blue Buick parked on the single strip of asphalt cutting through the rolling green. I hadn’t expected it, but it was a relief.

  Soft footsteps behind me. I didn’t turn around.

  “I should kick your ass,” Theron murmured.

  Just try it, Were. My hand tightened, loosened on the treetrunk, Mikhail’s apprentice-ring closed around the third finger. “Show some respect.”

  “Sorry.” And he was. “You gave me a scare, Jill.”

  It was my turn to apologize. “Sorry.”

  Silence. The chaplain stopped, then the recital began as the coffin lowered slowly into the waiting darkness.

  I duly swear myself to the service of the citizens of Santa Luz, to protect and to succor. I swear to act without fear or favor, to protect the innocent and to safeguard the living. I swear to be honest and true, to be a servant of the law, and to do my best each and every day, so that the citizens who place their trust in me are well and truly served by the power of Justice.

  I mouthed it along with them. Hunters have their prayer, I suppose cops are no different.

  A few of them said Amen afterward. Very quietly.

  My chest hurt, a sharp tearing pain. Something too sharp and smoking-hot to be grief loaded the back of my throat. My fingers tightened on rough treebark, I dropped my hand to my side, shook out the fingers so they were nice and loose.

  “Gilberto sends his regards,” Theron said softly. He stood so close I could feel the heat of his metabolism, but he carefully didn’t touch me. “He says he owes you a beer.”

  I nodded. “Tell him…” What, that he’s safe? That I watched him commit a murder and didn’t interfere? “Tell him I understand.” And that he’d better not get in the habit of killing people in my city.

  Rosie stepped forward. Neither of Carp’s ex-wives were here, and even if they had been Rosie probably still would have been the one to take the small shovel and scatter the first handful of dirt into the hole.

  I heard it clearly, small pebbles striking the roof of the coffin. A hollow sound of finality.

  “The warehouse on Cherry is cleaned out,” Theron continued, in a monotone. “No sign of scurf. We found an evocation altar downstairs in the Kat Klub. Looked pretty nasty.”

  “Leon told me.” I swallowed sourness. This morning’s breakfast had been a few mouthfuls of vodka, the sting relished before I hit the door running. “You’re good backup, Theron. Thanks.”

  He let out a sound that might have been a dissatisfied sigh, smothered in respect for the dead sleeping all around. “Saul’s been calling. He’s pretty upset. I haven’t been home much.”

  Shit. But it was a Were’s tactfulness, asking me what I wanted him to say. If he and Leon had thought I was in serious trouble, or dead, Theron would have been the one to bring Saul the bad news.

  It would not have been pretty.

  I braced myself. “Neither have I. But I’ll get hold of him soon. Let me talk to him.” In other words, Theron, this stays between you and me.

  He absorbed it. “How close was it, Jill?”

  What do you want me to tell you? “Close enough. I can’t count this one a win.” I stared unseeing at the tableau around the open, yawning grave, a mound of dirt covered with Astroturf sitting neglected to one side. Rosie’s chin was up. Monty had his arms folded, his shoulders slumped. Sullivan looked down at the ground, Piper’s cheeks were wet.

  “City’s still standing. And that ’breed who ran the Kat Klub—”

  “She’s dead.” I said it too quickly, on a breathy scree of air. Carp, I avenged you without knowing. I wish I could do it again.

  Sometimes avenging isn’t enough. They don’t tell you that when you’re training. You have to learn it on your own. It is one of the lessons that makes you a hunter, not an apprentice.

  The service began to break up. The honor guard marched away to their flashing vehicles; the knot of uniforms and suits at the graveside fraying. Theron watched with me, in silence. Monty stayed while car doors slammed and engines started.

  So did Rosie.

  The chaplain, an unassuming, balding little man in a black suit, exchanged a few words with Monty, who neatly cut him away from Rosie. She stood in the sun, her hair throwing back its light with a vengeance, her hands knotted into bloodless fists at her sides. She stared at the hole in the ground, then lifted her head, scanning the cemetery’s rolling greenness.

  I made a restless movement. Theron was still, the peculiar immobility of a cat Were.

  The chaplain headed off toward his own car, a sunny yellow Volkswagen Beetle. I stepped forward as he drove away. Picked my way with care around headstones and plates set in the ground, passing wilted flowers and the occasional shrub. The last twenty feet or so were the hardest, because I could feel Rosie’s eyes on me and the grave opened like a mouth. Strata of sprinkler-wet earth striped its sides.

  I came to a halt outside the awning’s shelter. The sun beat down.

  Monty clapped me awkwardly on the shoulder and handed me a new pager. “We’re going to Costanza’s.” The words hung in still air, the breeze had died.

  I nodded. Silver clanked as my hair moved.

  Rosenfeld sounded steady enough. “Give me a minute, Monty?”

  “Sure.” He shifted his weight, awkwardly.

  I could feel his gaze on me, maybe he was trying to tell me something. I didn’t look up. There were a few handfuls of dirt scattered across the coffin’s lacquered top, and someone had dropped in a rose. Probably Piper.

  Monty retreated. I steeled myself, raised my gaze, and met Rosie’s head-on.

  Rosenfeld was crying.

  Oh, hell.

  “He was Internal Affairs.” She lifted her prizefighter’s jaw a little bit, as if daring me to make something of it. “Jill…”

  So she knew.

  She was his partner, and probably knew him better than he knew himself. Of course she would at least suspect he was IA.

  “He was clean, Rosie.” The words came out in a rush. “I did my best. He saw something, something awful. I didn’t get there in time.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” Her mouth gapped a little, her nose inflamed—redheads can’t cry gracefully, at least not any redhead I’ve known. Then again, the whole point of crying is that nobody does it gracefully. “I thought… his ex-wives, and the case he was working. I thought…”

  “I got the people responsible.” My voice didn’t seem to work quite right. “I tied up the case.”

  “They’re dead? The motherfuckers that did for him?” She searched my face.

  Do you even need to ask me that? “They’re dead.” Except the other dirty cops Harvill had on a string. But sooner or later, I’ll get to them. I swear it, Rosie.

  It would be vengeance, and it wouldn’t help. But it was the least I owed her.

  She glanced at the grave, her mouth firming and twisting down, bitterly. “I’ve been thinking, I should have seen it. It was all there. He’s been withdrawing all year. Just sinking deeper and deeper into the pit. I should have nagged him into something. Counseling. Something.”

  Oh, Rosie. “It was the nightside, Rosie. Not him.” Give her that much, at least. Don’t let her blame herself for this. “I should have kept him under tighter wraps, made sure he was okay. It was on my watch. I’m… sorry.”

  “It isn’t your fault. He was already cracking.”

  I smelled the sweat and the misery on her. The heat was immense, Biblical, no shred of air moving to break the bubble of silence laid over us. We stood in the sun and watched each other.

  Once, Rosenfeld had checked herself out of the hospital and marched into my warehouse, all in order to apologize to me. Seeing the nightside up close had put a streak of white in her hair she had to dye and given her nightmares she’d
needed two years of therapy to face. The guilt would eat at her, because she had seen the naked face of darkness and survived.

  And Carp hadn’t.

  I broke the silence. “He was a good cop. A damn good cop.”

  The air started moving again, flirting and swirling as the breeze came up the hill, laden with heavy green rainsmell. We’d have thunderstorms as soon as the season started changing. Fall would ride in with afternoon rains, and winter. And here, sleeping under the earth, would the dead take any notice of weather?

  There was never any rain in Hell. I knew that for a fact.

  “He was,” Rosie agreed. “Don’t…”

  Don’t blame myself? “If you won’t, I won’t.”

  “Deal.” She held out her hand. I took it gingerly, and we shook the way women accustomed to men shake—a brief squeeze, eye contact, and a half-embarrassed smile.

  The scar throbbed, sensing the misery saturating afternoon scorch. I let go of her hot fingers. A thin trickle of salt sweat oozed down my spine. “You’d better go on. Monty probably needs a drink.”

  She let out an uneasy half-cackle of a laugh, choked off midway as she glanced toward the scar cut in the green earth. “I feel like I should stay with him.”

  “They’ll be along in a few minutes to fill in the… to fill it in. I’ll stay.” It’s my job. It’s the least I can do.

  She nodded once, sharply, her spiky hair drooping, plastered to her skull. We stood there for a few more moments, nothing left to say hanging between us.

  Her shoulders finally dropped. “I guess I’ll see you around?”

  Why did she make it a question? “I’m not going anywhere.” This is my city. And when I find the other dirty fucking cops, I’ll serve vengeance on them too. I promise. “Rosie? Take care of yourself.” Please.

  “Yeah. You too, Kismet.” Military-precise, she turned and headed for Monty’s car, running now. I thought of the air-conditioned comfort inside and breathed out softly through my mouth, since my nose was full.

  Monty pulled slowly away. Theron approached, and I heard a golf cart buzzing along. The diggers, two broad Hispanic men in chinos and blue button-downs—of course, I thought, white would show the sweat and the dirt, and we can’t have that—arrived, and gave me a nervous glance.

  I headed for the strip of asphalt and paused there, watching. One of the diggers had shucked his button-down and was in a black wifebeater. The other was still eyeing me. They began filling in the grave. Heat bounced, shimmering, up from the black asphalt, clawed at me in colorless waves. Still, I didn’t sweat much, even under the leather.

  I did wonder, standing there and watching them work with their shovels, if they had come over the border. I wondered if they’d been born in my city. I wondered if either of them had any idea who they were burying, or if it was just another job to them. I wondered if they resented the fact that they were cheaper than a machine, or if they were grateful for the work.

  And I wondered if they would ever want to know how hard I tried to keep them safe too. I couldn’t fix economic inequality, but I could stop hellbreed from preying on the poor and marginalized. One at a time and piecemeal, but it was better than nothing.

  They call us heroes, Mikhail sneered inside my head. Idiots. There is only one reason we do it, milaya, and it is for to quiet the screaming in our own heads.

  One of them said something in an undertone. The other laughed, replied with a snatch of softly-delivered song. It sounded oddly reverent. Even if it was just another job, they spoke quietly around the dead.

  “Jill?” Theron, at my shoulder again. “Come on. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “Hunters don’t go to police wakes, Theron.” It hurts too much. Far too much.

  “At Micky’s. I’ll spot you some lunch too. If I know you, you haven’t eaten.”

  I waited in the sun for another ten minutes. It didn’t take them long to fill in the grave and tamp it down. The taller one elbowed his partner, and they glanced at me again before loading their shovels and the Astroturf into the golf cart. They buzzed away. Maybe they had other holes to fill.

  Sleep well, Carp. My chest ached with all the things I could never say.

  I wiped at my face again. Jesus, Jill. Quit it. “I didn’t have much breakfast,” I admitted.

  Theron manfully restrained himself from commenting. “I’ll drive.”

  33

  The sun went down in a glory of red and orange. Wind shifted, veering in off the baking desert, but it carried a breath of something other than sand and summer on its back. A faint tang that meant autumn was coming. Not for a while, but still coming.

  I’d considered calling Perry. I’d even considered waltzing into the Monde Nuit and questioning him about Argoth. And about just what he’d known about Shen’s little bid for a bigger slice of domination in the city.

  Questioning him hard.

  In the end I dragged the cut-down discarded end of a metal barrel from the railyards behind my warehouse and fed it a mound of barbeque charcoal. I doused the briquettes with lighter fluid and wadded up bits of waste paper, lit a match.

  When the coals were glowing red to match the sun’s nightly death I dug in my pocket and pulled out the little Ziploc baggie.

  The purple crystals inside were slightly oily, giving under my fingers with a faint crunching through the plastic. I’d searched both Irene and Fax pretty thoroughly, but only Fax was carrying a sample and several folded sheets of paper covered with arcane notations.

  I never took any chemistry in high school, so they might as well have been Greek. They burned just like any ordinary paper.

  When they were ash I tossed the Ziploc in. There was a brief stench of burning plastic, and flame flared like the yolk-yellow light in Shen’s eyes.

  It still bothered me. Why hadn’t she brought other hellbreed to finish me off? Then again, if she was trying to make points with one of Hell’s higher-ups, she would have been greedy for the credit and unwilling to share. A big drawback to being hellbreed—they can’t trust each other, and barely even trust Traders mortgaged to their eyebrows.

  Which meant that maybe, just maybe, nobody else knew about this little foray into experimental chemistry.

  Dream, he’d called it. More like a nightmare. A nightmare nobody would wake up from. Cold sweat prickled along my arms, along the curve of my lower back. With this shit to provide a banquet, Argoth could have stuffed himself to the gills on death and destruction. He could have made an entire continent a living hell.

  Hey, he’d done it last time.

  The only thing about averting a goddamn apocalypse is that it happens so routinely. None of the civilians have any idea how close the world is, all the time, to going up in smoke.

  Sometimes I wonder if that ignorance is really a blessing.

  The purple crystals sizzled, I poked at the fire with Saul’s barbeque tongs to make sure every little scrap was consumed. Sparks rose, and I kept my face well out of the hot draft. Who knew what this shit could do to you?

  I did. I’d seen it.

  Argoth is coming… I can only hold the tide so long.

  How much had Perry known? Only as much as he’d told me? Or was he hoping I’d disrupt Shen’s plans?

  I didn’t want to know badly enough to let him fiddle with my head again.

  Getting cowardly in your old age, Jill?

  It didn’t matter. If another hellbreed was crazy enough to try following in Shen’s footsteps, they’d get the same treatment. I knew what to look for, now. And even if Perry hadn’t been involved… well, we’d just have to see.

  I hate just waiting to see.

  The scar pulsed under a copper cuff, one of the old ones Galina had dug up for me. With Saul gone I was back to the copper, since I can’t work leather to save my life.

  The sun finished sinking below the horizon. My city trembled, waking up to nightlife.

  The phone shrilled. I made sure every scrap of chemical and paper was gone, then stamped i
nside and scooped it up right before the answering machine would click on. “Talk,” I half-snarled. What now? Goddammit.

  “Hey, kitten.” A familiar voice. He sounded sad, and bone-deep exhausted. “Glad to hear you.”

  Oh, God. “Saul.” I sounded like all the air had been punched out of me. “Jesus. Good to hear you too. What’s going on?”

  “I was about to ask you that. Can’t get hold of Theron. Everything okay out there?”

  I closed my eyes, throttling the sigh of relief in my chest. “Just fine. Been a little busy, is all. How are you? What’s going on out there?”

  “You sure you’re okay, kitten?” The rumble hid behind his voice. Distress.

  “Just fine. Fine as frog’s fur.” I just fucked this thing up six ways from Sunday and almost lost my whole city. But it’s cool. “We had a scurf scare and some Traders getting uppity. The usual. It’s all packed away now.” I stopped myself from babbling with sheer relief. “How are you? What’s happened?”

  “She’s gone.” A world of sadness in two words. “I’m coming home. Due in Tuesday at eleven P.M., I’m at the train station now.”

  Oh, thank God. “I’m so sorry.” My breath caught. He’s coming home. “You sound awful.”

  “Thanks.” A dollop of wry humor lightening grief for just a moment. “She went peacefully. My aunts were there.”

  I listened to him breathe for a few endless moments. “I love you.” Soft, high-pitched, as if I’d just been caught in the wrong bathroom in junior high.

  It must have been the right thing to say. The rumble behind his breathing lessened. “I love you too, kitten. Pick me up?”

  “With bells on.” Where am I going to find a car? Shit, I don’t care. He’s coming home.

  “You sure you’re okay?” Now he sounded concerned. “You seem a little—”