Night Shift jk-1

by Lilith Saintcrow

  It didn’t want to go. It had been waiting a long time, this cheated howl. For six months at least, ever since I’d stood beside my teacher’s pyre and felt the chill wind against my tear-slick cheeks, as the sobs I couldn’t let go bolted down into my stomach and turned into a steady red flame of rage. Against hellbreed, against Sorrows, against Mikhail—yes, I committed that sin. I raged against my teacher for leaving me alone.

  But most of all, I turned that blowtorch of agonized grief on myself. Because I had failed to save him.

  And now, here I was.

  “Shhhh.” Saul was on the bed next to me. I flinched, throwing up an elbow—but he caught the strike with one broad hand, shoved it down without missing a beat. His arms circled me, a cage I wanted even as I leaned away from it. “Let it out. Let it go.”

  “I can’t.” Heat and water slicked my cheeks. A sob broke the second word halfway, and I went rigid, leaning away from him. “I’ve got w-work to d-do tonight—”

  More hellbreed holes to torch. Because tonight’s as good a night as any to do a little murder in the name of getting Perry’s voice out of my head. I don’t c-care if I’m too’t-tired—

  The thought trailed off into a hoarse gasp as he pulled me off-center, into the shelter of warmth and the sound of someone else’s pulse. Were filled my nose, a musky boy scent mixed in with something that was one of a kind, his, unique. When had I started recognizing that smell?

  An even bigger question—when had I started liking it? When had it become safe, as safe as Mikhail’s long-gone odor of pepper, leather, vodka, cordite, and foreign skin?

  That was what broke me, finally. The remembered smell of my teacher, a powerful sensory memory of the only man who had ever protected me. Gone forever now, buried with him, nothing of that ephemeral imprint of a soul remaining except in my faltering human recollection.

  My cold, comfortless, pitiless memory of everything I would rather forget.

  I clamped my jaw down over the sobs. Swallowed them one by one as they rose, juddering me like an earthquake. My own personal set of seizures, rocking me off the face of the earth. I made no sound. He was silent too, not even thrumming the deep hum Weres use for wounded animals. He stroked my hair, silver chiming and tinkling; slid his hand under the heavy weight and cupped my nape, his thumb moving soothingly just under my ear. He simply breathed, and held me.

  The shakes quieted bit by bit. Thunder in the distance. There would be flash floods out in the desert, the gullies and channels cut through Santa Luz would be full for once, liquid pumping through the city’s dry veins. The simple fact was, there was nothing I could do tonight, even if I wanted to. If I went between in this state I’d get lost, my focus gone. If I went down into a hellbreed hole I’d end up getting myself scorched. I was too tired, too nerve-strung, and too goddamn edgy.

  I’d just hit the wall, bigtime.

  Finally I rested against Saul, awkward, my upper body twisted and my cheek pressed against his shoulder. His hand had moved down from my nape, stroking my back evenly. Stopped, his fingers playing with the arch of a rib. Came back to my spine, tracing muscle definition through my T-shirt.

  “I don’t even like you,” I whispered mournfully into his shoulder. Could have kicked myself, taking a deep breath of him. Then one more. Maybe just one more. You do much more of this, Jill, and you’re not going to want to stop.

  He didn’t take offense. Maybe he even understood. “Give it time. I’m told I grow on people.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I squeezed my eyes shut until starbursts of red and gold burst, my blue eye still seeing the complicated strings of energy in his aura that shouted, Were.

  A shrug, careful not to dislodge me. “Because you need it. Because I want to.” A careful tone, giving nothing away. “Good enough for now?”

  Not nearly good enough. I don’t even know what it is you’re doing. You’re fucking up my head and I need to be clear for this. “You need to stop.” I couldn’t make the words louder than a whisper. “I can’t afford this.” I can’t afford any of this.

  “No strings, no payment, no bargains. I’m not hellbreed.” Was that a new coolness in his tone?

  I hoped so, and I didn’t hope so. “I didn’t—”

  “Shut up.” No anger, just flat finality. His pulse beat steady under my cheek.

  I did. He held me, and for a while it was enough. Long enough for me to promise myself a hundred times that this next breath I took of him would be the last—and to break that promise, each and every time.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  You spend a lot of time on rooftops as a hunter. The high ground is always best, it’s another cardinal law.

  Of course, when you’re tracking someone else who hangs out on the roof as a matter of habit, it can get a bit tricky. But my quarry didn’t even look up. He glided through shadow and streetlamp light, flickering through belts of orange glow, pausing only to catch the rhythm of a street before sliding along on the tangent least likely to draw notice.

  When you have the preternatural sensitivity of a hellbreed, you can afford to stay far back. But the scar burned and prickled so much, the welter of sensation so deep and terrible each time, Mikhail had suggested covering it up. Galina had copper cuffs, and they seemed to work just fine… but I could still hear the slight scrape of Mikhail’s boots against concrete, his pulse hammering. I could almost taste his pheromones on the air, a lingering trail of phosphorescence.

  I hung back, just at the very edge of his sensing range.

  But he wasn’t watching for a tail—who would follow him?

  Nobody except a stupid girl, that’s who. Just finished with her training, and curious about where her teacher had taken to disappearing so frequently. Curiosity might have killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back—that was one of Val’s sayings.

  I tried not to think about Val.

  The new coat made a slight flapping noise and I cursed silently, stopping still. But my teacher didn’t even break stride. He had a bounce in his step, and plunged into a network of alleys at the fringe of the barrio.

  What was out here for him? I fell further back, following him only as a faint faraway song, more a pressure against sensitive ear membranes than music.

  It was wonderful, and I couldn’t wait to surprise my teacher with this new dimension to the mark we’d bargained so hard for. Although how I could do that without him knowing I’d tracked him … that was the question.

  I was so busy thinking about it I almost stepped over the silent edge of Mikhail’s field of awareness. He had stopped in a deep well of shadow in the lee of an alley, and the air itself listened when he told it to.

  Silence folded itself around me, my heartbeat smoothing out. I dropped into a crouch and drew that silence like a blanket around my shoulders. It was a trick he himself taught me, and the small burst of pride inside my chest from performing it so successfully warred with caution and growing unease. What was he doing?

  Did it matter? He had a right to privacy, didn’t he? That was why he wasn’t sleeping in the same bed with me anymore. I had my own room and my own blankets now.

  A slim shadow unmelded itself from the end of the alley. I would have held my breath, but training had me in its grip—you do not rob yourself of the advantage of oxygen while you’re on a rooftop watching a shadow in an alley. You just don’t.

  She swayed toward him, blue silk whispering, and my mouth gaped open, both to provide me with soft shallow breaths and also so the shock could escape my throat in a soundless puff. Long dark hair and pale, pale skin, she was willow-graceful and must have smelled of incense and honey.

  Under that smell of female attractiveness was an edge. It was rusty, blotted with old iron blood, and somehow wrong. My left eye twitched and watered, seeing the strings under the surface of the world resonate in response to sorcerous pulsing.

  Whoever she was, she wasn’t wholly human. But Mikhail stood still, light gleaming in his pallid hair, as she swayed
toward him, moving so supple and soft I could imagine anything but legs under her skirts. A faint murmur reached me, satin-soft; she was talking to him.

  My hackles rose.

  Mikhail reached for her like a drowning man grabbing at buoyant wreckage, and they drew back into the alley’s shadow. The clink of his belt buckle unloosing under those pale fingers was as loud as a shot to my tender ears, and I looked away, my face and ears burning with a shame that poured down my throat in a river of bitterness.

  The soft sounds—her murmurs, his gasping for breath, the wet sound of lips and tongues meeting—tore across my eardrums like copper spines. Heat and shame alternated with burning cold, laid on my skin like a heavy fur coat. The scar prickled, running with gleeful vicious pain.

  Was it my anger? Or was it that I was even now, nailed to the edge of this rooftop in an easy crouch, obeying my training and staying quiet and still as an adder under a rock?

  Mikhail’s little snake under the rock. The trouble was, there were more things under this rock than just snakes.

  I eased back, one step at a time, but not quickly enough to escape hearing the climax. I knew that full-throated hitch in Mikhail’s breathing, the body brought to bay, the way he would stiffen and sometimes drive his teeth into my shoulder to muffle any sound.

  Training doesn’t stop in the bedroom, either.

  I thought it was because of the mark. The thought came from nowhere, rising to fill my head like bad gas in a mine shaft. I thought he didn’t want me because of the scar.

  A hard, cold truth surfaced underneath it. Is he Trading? That doesn’t look like a hellbreed. First you’ve got to find out what it is, Jill. How would you do that?

  I knew how. First a visit to Hutch, the man with the library of rare texts. Then dropping by Galina’s and casually, oh so casually, asking a few questions.

  Then what? What the hell was I thinking? He was my teacher.

  I eased away. Soundless, even my coat didn’t flap.

  Alternating hot and cold waves started at my crown and ran through to my soles. I was burning and freezing to death at once, but my body kept moving, training becoming instinct I did not run blindly. I just kept moving through the city, leaping from roof to roof with my coat flaring behind me, no sound except a huff of effort when I landed, etheric force pulled tingling through the flushed hard knot of the scar until I ended up under the granite Jesus atop Sisters of Mercy, hunched over, arms crossed tight and squeezing down to hold my heaving ribs in. Hot salt water slicked my cheeks, and now that I was out of the danger zone I heard soft weak sounds spilling from my throat.

  I was sobbing.

  The terrible thing was, I swallowed each sob, and they sounded like a woman in the ultimate crisis of sex, helpless shudders racking me. Each sound was a weakness, and reminded me of my teacher’s body clasped against something in a dark alley, the stabbing motions of any cheap John taking a hooker against the wall.

  The shame was worse than the anger, because both were marks of how I’d failed once more to be what a man needed. If Mikhail was Trading, how could I trust him? How could he trust me, with a hellbreed scar turned into a hard knot of corruption on the inside of my wrist?

  I never told anyone, but that was the moment I truly became a hunter. Because I suddenly knew I could not even rely on my teacher—if he was Trading with something inhuman, he was a question mark until I figured out what was going on. He had taught me well, and the logic was inescapable. He was hiding something, and I wouldn’t be able to rest until I knew what it was.

  Until the rock was lifted and I saw the pale squirming things underneath.

  I had not been an innocent when he found me, but the last dregs of whatever innocence I had left me under the granite Jesus. Because even while I cried, I was planning.

  The tears would not last nearly long enough.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I flipped on the radio next morning to hear the bad news, and only relaxed a little when no messages or news of murders came in. Autumn floods had arrived with a vengeance, and the rain lasted long enough to spring a leak in my ceiling. I stuck a large plastic tub I used for soaking blood out of leather under the silvery drops and promptly forgot about it. I had other things to worry about.

  Galina was regretful. “I can’t, Jill. I’ve got serious Work to do in my sanctum for the next three days, I’m closed down and tapped out. I would, but this is for the shields, and—”

  I said I understood. And I did.

  Avery was a bust too. “The exorcisms are kicking my ass. I’d slip, Jill. I’m not strong enough and you know it. Eva and Benito are out too, we had to sweep the whole city last night. It’s turning into a madhouse out here.”

  Guilt, a hot rank bubble, rose in my throat. “I’m working on it, Ave.”

  He made a short sound of annoyance. Behind him, phones rang and someone shouted something. It sounded like he was up in Vice, probably bullshitting with his buddy Lefty Perez. “Since when do you stop working on it? Can the martyr trip, Jill. Clear your head out and get this bastard sewn up so we can have that beer together.”

  I made my goodbyes and hung up, chewing at my bottom lip. Saul handed me a cup of coffee. “No breakfast?” he asked for the third time.

  My stomach clenched into an iron fist. “Not before something like this.”

  “I told you I’d anchor you. I wouldn’t be much of a tracker if I couldn’t.” He’d showered, and his hair lay glistening-dark against his shoulders except for the twin braids on either side. It was a good look for him, framing the classic purity of his cheekbones, balancing out the line of his jaw. He wore the same T-shirt, and I wondered how light he traveled. I hadn’t seen a suitcase yet.

  “I don’t know you that well. No offense.”

  An easy shrug, as if I couldn’t offend him. “None taken, but it looks like I’m all you’ve got. Harp’s not a tracker, and Dom’s her mate.”

  In other words, she wouldn’t like it if Dom got close enough to anchor me. I could call Theron, I supposed. I could even scare up a few more people if I had to, including Father Guillermo down at Sacred Grace.

  But Gui wasn’t strong enough for something like this. Anyone else I could call in would be a risk—and at risk, not only because I’d be vulnerable, but because the process itself was so dangerous.

  I studied Saul in the fall of sunlight through the skylights. It was pale, washed-clean light, fresh and bled white by the storm last night. The weather report said the storms were moving in, coming from a ridge out in the desert meeting another ridge coming up the Luz River’s broad slow muscular bends. We’d have heat lightning tonight and more rain tomorrow when the weather finished rolling up like a parade of barrio low-riders.

  Saul’s jaw was set, his eyes sleepless and fierce. The silver twisted tighter against one of his damp braids pulling the hair out of his face. I didn’t ask him where he’d slept last night, because my bed had smelled like both of us this morning. I smelled a little like him too, the tang of Were mixing with cordite and silver and leather, and the faint trace of hellbreed and death that clung to my skin. It was a heady mix.

  The bracelet was unrecognizable now, twining through his hair like a morning-glory vine through a fence. I stared at the gleaming metal for a moment, memory boiling up under my skin.

  He paused in the act of taking a sip from his own coffee cup. Steam drifted up, touching his face. “What?”

  The blonde hair, and the red hair, twisting around each other. I set my coffee cup down and bounced to my feet from the rumpled bed. I moved in on him so fast I half expected him to flinch, but he kept still, watching me. His eyes were very dark, and very deep.

  The silver was warm from his heat, a Were metabolism bleeding warmth into the air. I touched the metal, running my fingers over the tight curves married to the silky texture of wet hair. “Did you do this? Make it bend like this?”

  “It happened.” He didn’t move, but I sensed a shrug.

  “It happens.
So what?” The faintest hint of a challenge, his chin lifting just a fraction. Mulishly defiant, and a startlingly young look for a Were so contained. How old was he?

  I ran my tongue along the inside of my teeth, shelving the question. Something else bothered me, the shape of an idea just under the blanket of my consciousness.

  He isn’t my father’s … he’s mine. “So what does it mean, Saul?”

  His fingers flicked. He caught one of the charms tied into my hair with red thread and gave it a slight tug, his eyebrow quirking meaningfully and his mouth firming into a straight line.

  Knowing Weres, that was the only answer I was going to get from him. I’d have to talk to Harp about it. Something about the two hairs twining together bothered me. Or not precisely bothered me, but gave me the tail end of an idea I didn’t much like, one I had to tease out with an hour or so of hard thinking. An hour or so I didn’t have right now. The unsteady feeling behind my pulse told me this thing was wending its way to a conclusion, and not a pleasant one.

  You don’t live with adrenaline and intuition, not to mention sorcery, for very long without getting a feeling about when a situation’s going to blow sky-high. I let out a soft breath, frustration blooming sharp under my breastbone. My palms were damp again. “All right. You’ll anchor me. I hope to hell you know what you’re doing.”

  “I usually do.” He let go of the charm, patted my hair back into place. The look of defiance was gone, replaced with calm steadiness. “Don’t worry. I won’t let you fall.”

  It was oddly comforting to hear him say it.