Saint City Sinners

by Lilith Saintcrow

  I went still, closed my eyes. My shields shivered. “Fine.” I would never have thought a demon could throw a tantrum. My rings popped, sparking, I wondered what the normals around us made of this. His aura covered mine, pulled close and comforting, but I felt the echo of his attention. He was doing it again, listening to a sound I couldn’t hear, set at a harsh watchful awareness I couldn’t imagine anyone keeping up for very long.

  Why? I’m only here for Gabe, but Japh seems to think I’m in danger. Of course I’m in bloody danger, there are demons after me. Still—

  “I never knew dissatisfaction before I met you, hedaira. The only time I feel any peace is when you are safe and I am near you. Be careful who you spend your smiles on, and be careful of what you make of me.” Japhrimel paused. “I am seeking to be gentle, but frustration may make me savage.”

  In all the time I’d known him, he had never said anything even remotely like this. My throat went dry, my heart banging at my ribs and in my neck, the darkness behind my eyelids suddenly blood-warm. “You mean more savage than you already are?” I pulled against his hand again. I might as well have been chained to the dock.

  “You have no idea of the depth of my possible savagery.” It wasn’t so much the content of his words as the way they were delivered, with a chill even tone I could have thought was indifference except for the well of sharp rage behind it. Japhrimel for the first time in my memory was furious, holding himself to control with an effort of will. “I tell you again, be careful. And again, I do not expect your forgiveness or understanding. I require only your cooperation, which I will get by any means I deem necessary. We are here to see what is so urgent with your Necromance friend, well and good. But do not taunt me.”

  Taunt you? “Taunt you? I’m not the one who keeps playing manipulative little games here, Japh. It’s you and Lucifer who have the corner on that one. Let go of me.”

  Much to my surprise, he did. I almost stumbled, the release of tension against my arm was so quick. I opened my eyes, the world rushing back in to meet me, and lifted my left hand slightly. The katana’s weight was reassuring. “We’ve got a cab to catch,” I said over my shoulder. “Unless you’re going somewhere else.”

  He didn’t dignify that with a reply. It was probably just as well.

  Gabe’s house crouched on Trivisidiro Street, behind high walls her great-great something-or-other had built. Her family had been cops and Necromances for a long time, passing along Talent and training in a haphazard way before the Awakening and the Parapsychic Act. They had survived because they were rich, and because they did everything possible to blend in before the Act made it possible for psions to come out of the shadows.

  I deliberately did not look when we passed over the block that held a huge pile of stone with high holly hedges and walls. Aran Helm’s house, where I’d begun to figure out just what nightmare had risen from the depths of Rigger Hall.

  I didn’t want to see if Helm’s house still stood.

  The first shock was that the neighborhood had changed. The winds of urban renewal had swept through what had once been a bad part of town, I saw several little boutiques and chic eateries as well as other restored homes.

  The second shock, when we got out of the hovercab and Japhrimel paid the driver, was that the shields over Gabe’s walls had changed. The hovercab lifted away with a whine, and my skin chilled again. I was really getting to hate hovers.

  I caught Japhrimel’s arm. He stilled, looking down at me. Leander stood on the corner, his eyes moving over the street and probably marking it in his memory; it was the same thing I did in an unfamiliar city. “Her shields are different,” I said quietly, knowing I had Japh’s full attention. “Look, can you and Leander wait for me?” He moved slightly, and I interrupted him before he began. “I give my word I won’t go anywhere but into Gabe’s house, I promise I’ll come back out to you. I swear. But please, Japhrimel, this is private.”

  “You continually try to push the limits of—” he began and I squeezed his arm, sinking my fingers in. I couldn’t hurt him, but just this once, I wanted to. I wished I could. My claws slid free, pricking into his coatsleeve, my entire hand cramping with the effort to stop them.

  “Please, Japh.” My voice gentled, it took an effort that would have made me sweat in my human days. Something suspiciously like tears pressed against the inside of my throat, so it came out muffled and choked instead of only soft. “Don’t make me beg you over something like this.” I can’t stand begging you over something so simple. I can’t stand begging you at all.

  “You do not have to.” He nodded, once, sharply. “An hour. No more. Or I will come in for you, Dante, and I will demolish her precious shields. If I even think you may be in danger—or seeking to escape me—I will do the same. Is that clear?”

  “Crystal.” I let go of his arm, finger by finger. When did you get so arrogant? You were so gentle in Toscano, Japh. Drew in a sharp deep breath flavored with the smell of dusk in Santiago City—the taint of chemicals, damp, and mold rising from the ground, the tang of the sea and the further iron-rich smell of the lake to the east, the throbbing whine of hover traffic. “Thank you.” I didn’t sound grateful, but I suppose I might have been.

  “There is no need to thank me, either. Go.” A muscle flicked in his golden cheek again.

  I moved away, across the sidewalk, and stepped up to Gabe’s gate. Brushed against her shields, a familiar touch, and realized what was wrong. The shields Eddie had put up, the spiky earth-flavored magick of a Skinlin, were fading rapidly, as if they’d been mostly dismantled and left to shred away from the other defenses.

  A curious flutter began under my pulse. Eddie and Gabe had been together so long they seemed eternal.

  She was home, and awake. One of the things about visiting psions, when we have a minor in precog we’re usually home when you need us. Her shields flushed red as I laid my hand against the gate; the lock clicked open as Gabe’s work recognized me. I pushed at the gate before it could close again and stepped through.

  The gardens were another shock, full of weeds. Eddie had always kept them pristine—of course, a dirtwitch’s trade is in his garden. Skinlin are mostly concerned with growing things, like hedgewitches, but hedgewitches are more interested in using plant material to accessorize spellwork. Skinlin are the modern equivalent of kitchen witches; most of them work for biotech firms, getting plants to give up cures for mutating diseases and splicing together plant DNA with sonic magick or complicated procedures. Their only real drawback is that they’re berserkers in a fight. A Skinlin in a rage is like a Chillfreak—they don’t stop even when wounded. Eddie was fast, mean, and good; I never wanted to fight him.

  I trudged up to the front door as night began to breathe in the garden, more disturbed than I could have ever admitted. The mark on my shoulder pulsed steadily like a heartbeat. Japhrimel, keeping contact with me the only way he could.

  Is it the only way he can? I’ve heard his voice inside my head before, been able to call him without words. The thought froze me on the step, my hand raised to knock on Gabe’s red-painted door. The house simmered above me, three stories of brownstone with even more shielding wedded to its physical structure. Would I know it if Japhrimel was inside my mind right now, a thin shadow under my thoughts?

  The idea called up a nervous flare of something close to panicked loathing. Communication was one thing, but thinking the cubic centimeters inside my skull might not be wholly my own was . . .

  You learn early that your body betrays you—it’s your mind that has to stay impregnable. Polyamour’s voice echoed in my memory, husky and beautiful. I shivered, pushed the thought away.

  The door opened. Gabe regarded me with her dark eyes. The final shock was the worst one, I think, the one that made the world go gray and the mark on my shoulder smash with pain that shocked me, brought me up and made me gasp. My emerald burned on my cheek, answering hers.

  Gabriele Spocarelli, Necromance and my friend, had age
d.

  7

  Gabe made tea, moving around her kitchen; the house smelled of dust and I saw . . . well, there were toys scattered through the hall, toddler’s toys, blocks and small hovercars made of primary-colored nontoxic plasilica. Other things. A small shoe in one corner of the kitchen, the heavy spice of kyphii in the air mixed with other smells no longer familiar.

  She hadn’t said anything about a kid during the phone calls. Not a single word. Not even a hint.

  Gabe’s long dark hair was threaded with gray since she’d stopped dyeing it, and the wrinkles fanning from the corners of her eyes spoke of frequent smiling. She was still slim and strong, shorter than me and with an air of serenity and precision I had envied so many times. I wondered if she still carried her longsword, a piece of sharp metal far too big for her. When I’d been human, I often thought I never wanted to face her for real over that steel—she was capable of cool clinical viciousness not many other fighters possessed. She’d been a cop all her life, going from the Academy into the Saint City PD, fighting the good fight.

  She wasn’t old, not by any stretch—but being a cop had marked her, turned her hair prematurely gray. That gray alone told me volumes. For Gabe to go against Codes and not dye her hair black was either exceeding vanity or a sign she wasn’t working professionally anymore. She still moved with the ease of combat practice and flexibility; she hadn’t gotten sloppy like some old bounty hunters or cops do. But there was a slight stiffness, a shadow of slowness, that hadn’t been there before. She had graduated from the Academy a full five years ahead of me; one of the few psions to have taken a break between primary training at Stryker and entering for her accreditation. She’d spent those years in Paradisse becoming a cosmopolitan, then come dutifully home and done what her family had always done—gone through advanced schooling, taken her Trial, and settled into being a cop.

  We’d been friends a long, long time.

  I sat at the old breakfast bar, looking at the fall of fading sunlight through the kitchen window, and felt the full consciousness of time settle in on me.

  She had aged, and I hadn’t. I still looked the same as I had when I opened my eyes in a Nuevo Rio mansion to find a demon had Fallen and shared his power with me. My hair was shorter, true; but otherwise I was the same. On the outside.

  They were only tiny changes, the lines on her face and the threads of gray in her hair. If I’d stayed in Saint City I probably wouldn’t have even noticed.

  “How long has it been?” I should know. I should know how long it’s been.

  She cast me a shuttered, dark look. “You’ve lost track? Of course, you disappeared. And time’s not your strong suit.”

  I opened my mouth to defend myself, shut it. I had disappeared. With Japhrimel, and she didn’t know. We’d settled in Toscano, and I’d buried myself in decoding Magi shadowjournals, searching for the clues that would tell me what I was because he would not. I thought it was a matter of embarrassment—most demons are very touchy about the whole subject of the Fallen, and I thought perhaps Japh didn’t want to speak of something painful and degrading.

  Now I wondered.

  Her bitter laugh brought me back to the present. “Only a couple years. Don’t worry, Danny. I understand, as much as I can. I saw you after the Lourdes case, remember? You were dead on your feet, sunshine. I’m just glad to see you now.”

  “You called.” I couldn’t produce more than a croak. “Mainuthsz. Of course I came.”

  Her back stiffened as she faced the kettle on the stove. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

  “You know me better than that.” Or at least you should. Was I hurt?

  “You and your damn sense of honor.” She cleared her throat. “There’s two things I want from you, Valentine. I’ll make you tea and we’ll talk.”

  I nodded, though she was facing the other way. Her aura, bright with the trademark sparkles of a Necromance, swirled steadily. Where was Eddie? I couldn’t imagine him leaving her.

  Memory swallowed me again.

  “I’ll catch him, Eddie. Or her. Whoever’s doing this.”

  He snatched his fingertips away, his dark eyes scarred holes above hollow unshaven cheeks. “Yeah. You do that. Word of advice? When you do catch ’em, don’t bring ’em back alive. Anything to do wit’ Rigger Hall is better off dead.”

  “Including us?”

  Eddie moved, sliding his legs out of the booth and standing up. He tapped at his datband and looked down at me, his shaggy blond hair tangling in his eyes. “Sometimes I think so,” he said, quietly, and his eyes were haunted wells. “Then I look at Gabe, and I ain’t so sure.”

  I found nothing to say to that. Eddie stumped away toward the door, and I let him go.

  No, I could not imagine Eddie leaving her.

  I surfaced. This was proving to be harder than I’d thought, past swallowing present as it so often did these days. Was it because I was older too inside this slim golden body? I had been no spring chicken when Japh changed me. Most bounty-hunting psions have a short shelf life, despite genesplicing repair bodies under constant hard use.

  Gabe poured the tea. I stayed silent. She’d tell me what she wanted, she would either solve the mystery or not. If not, it would be obvious she didn’t want to talk about it, and the least I owed Gabe was a measure of tact. If anything happened to her, the last person who remembered my human self—truly remembered my human self—would be gone.

  How would I go on then? Getting more and more distracted, shackled to Japhrimel, maybe forced into ever more complex games with Lucifer when he had some further use for me, trying to preserve some shred of my humanity . . .

  Stop it, Danny. You’ll go nuts if you keep thinking like that. Just stop it.

  Chamomile tea for me, in a long black sinuous mug familiar enough to make a funny melting sensation begin under my breastbone. Chai for her, in a new mug—a sunshine-yellow one. That was a change. She usually wasn’t a sunshiny-yellow type of person.

  I wonder if it’s having a kid that does it. Where is the little person who plays with the toys, Gabe, and why didn’t you tell me? That qualifies as major life news. I would have liked to have been here for that.

  She hadn’t told me, hadn’t even hinted. Why? Of course, I hadn’t ever hinted I was living with a demon who had resurrected himself from ash, either. One secret balancing out the other?

  She leaned against the breakfast bar, her fingers clasped around the tea mug. I saw the beginnings of a papery dryness on the fragile skin on the back of her hands, and felt that melting sensation again. Swallowed hard against it.

  “No questions?” Gabe smiled. “No, you wouldn’t ask me a damn thing, would you. You’d wait for me to tell you, or never mention it if I didn’t. Hades, I forgot what it’s like to talk to you.” She turned away, stalked across the kitchen, and scooped something up from the cluttered counter. The clutter was something new too, her house had always been neat before. Dishes were stacked in the sink, a few holomags scattered across the far end of the breakfast bar, and dust lay on the counter next to me.

  “I hope it’s pleasant.” It was just the thing Japhrimel might have said.

  “Sometimes.” She tossed it on the counter in front of me. It was a file folder. “I want you to help me kill whoever did this,” she said tonelessly, and I realized she was holding onto her serenity by the thinnest of threads.

  “Okay,” I said promptly, opening the folder. Consider ’em dead, Gabe.

  I would have agreed to it because I trusted her. I also would have agreed to it because looking at the first sheet in the folder—a nice glossy laseprint—showed a body lying on a white floor, a wrack and ruin of shattered glass winking up and dusting the blood that had dried sticky, spreading out in an impossibly large stain. But what drove the breath from my lungs was the face at the top of the ruined mass of flesh.

  The mark on my shoulder crunched again, dragging me out of shock. I swallowed something that tasted like human bile. “Eddie,” I whisper
ed.

  It was his body, indisputably dead. The experience of many other murder scenes rose under my skin, I noted the bullet holes clinically. Projectile weapons, a good way to take out a raging Skinlin. His shaggy head, the arc of his cheekbone as his chin was tipped back, the dark-blond whiskers telling me he hadn’t shaved for a day or so before his death. Mercifully, if age had ravaged him, it wasn’t visible in the picture.

  “When?” The sinuous black mug chattered against the countertop, I reined myself in with an effort.

  “Ten days ago.” Her hands tightened again around her mug. I could almost taste the gunpowder anger roiling off her, used like a shield against the shock of loss.

  I knew that territory. I’d seen it as a Necromance in the families of the departed, and been through it myself when Doreen, and later Jace, died. Two events, seeming as if they happened to different people, completely different Danny Valentines. Then there was the terrible almost-year I’d spent mourning Japhrimel as he lay dormant, ash in an urn. I remembered the abyss of loneliness and black despair, the mind bumping against the single word gone because the word dead was too final, no matter that Death was my trade.

  We all think we’re immortal, even Necromances. Necromances, really, should know better. And yet we never do.

  “There’s one more thing,” Gabe said. “Before you agree.”

  “Too late. I’ve already agreed.” My throat was dry and raw as a scraped-clean coremelt. “Mainuthsz.”

  She made a low hurt sound, but when I looked up her eyes were dry. She reached down under the counter, as if she was digging in her pocket, and brought out another small piece of paper. I took it, and found myself looking down at a laseprint of a beautiful little toddler with Gabe’s dark eyes and Eddie’s wild blond hair, wearing a pair of denim overalls and grinning up without a care in the world. Behind her, the green of a laurel hedge writhed.

  So this was who had been using the toys. The world had indeed changed while I’d been in Toscano, burying myself in books. Had she been pregnant during the hunt for Kellerman Lourdes? Either then or right after, it was a distinct possibility.