Night Shift jk-1

by Lilith Saintcrow

  “It’s not the falling I’m worried about. It’s the climbing back up out of between.” I eyed the coffee cup longingly, heat from the mug burrowing into my fingers. Handed it back to him. “Let’s do it before I lose my nerve.”

  “I can’t imagine that happening,” he muttered as he turned away.

  Ridiculously, I was hard-pressed not to smile.

  I rarely used this narrow room, as the padlock and the chain on the door proved. It was little more than a closet set to the side of my practice-room, the empty wall opposite that had held Mikhail’s sword lying under a rectangle of thin sunlight. I made a mental note to pick up the sunsword from Galina’s and led tire Were through the door. Darkness swallowed us, broken only by a faint silver glow.

  The altar was at the other end of the room, and the walls were covered with an intaglio of spray paint, blue and black, protection-symbols from almost every religion since the dawn of time. Fat lines of paint shifted like tentacles, responding to my presence, and the air hummed as my eyes adapted, pupils flaring wide.

  Cut into the hardwood floor was a double circle, spiky symbols carved between the inner and outer rings. The pentacle, inscribed just as deeply, glowed with silver hammered into its sharp lines. Hardwood inside the circle was stained darker than the surrounding floor, the silver pale and drained but glittering faintly, like a half-busted neon sign.

  “Huh.” Saul peered over my shoulder, his heat burning through his T-shirt and mine. “Nice.”

  If you think so. My fingers tightened on the knife I carried, the only weapon I had on me. I felt damn near naked. “Mikhail did it. As a present.” And also so I don’t have to use a church to go between, since most churches are tactical nightmares when it comes to defense and I’m vulnerable while I do this.

  It was the last present he’d ever given me. The warehouse, and this little room, hours of work and love I hadn’t thanked him properly for. Three days later, he’d been dead, bleeding out through slashed jugulars in a cheap hotel room as the Sorrows bitch he’d fallen in love with fled with his amulet and I kicked in the door just a quarter-minute too late, unable to save him.

  Oh, Mikhail. The familiar bite of shame turned bitter in my throat.

  “He must have spent some time on it.” Saul pushed past me, lingering for a little longer than absolutely necessary as he touched me, and stepped away to examine the circle, giving it his full attention. There was barely enough room for it, but it was complete, the carved lines deep and still fresh.

  A swift pain lanced through my heart. I could remember Mikhail with his arm over my shoulders. Is for you, milaya. Use wisely. Some day old Mischa might not be here to protect his little snake under rock, eh?

  I missed him. I missed him so much, even the slaps and the kicks as he trained me. Even the fear in the middle of the night. You must love your teacher as deeply as you hate him; the love will bring you back from Hell while your teacher holds the line. That love will also save you if you lose your way in the shifting forests of suicide and screaming that are the border between Hell and our world of flesh and light. The love is necessary.

  The hate is to make you strong. Out in the wilds of the nightside, there is no second chance, and your teacher has to make sure you can survive on your own. It’s bad to lose a fellow hunter, there are few enough of us as it is. Losing an apprentice is much, much worse.

  So it’s love, and hate, and need. All twisted together and made into a rope, a bond, a chain. A fetter each hunter wears with pride, and the reason why we don’t lie to each other. You can’t lie to someone else who’s been loved like that.

  No matter what secret your teacher keeps from you. No matter how deep the betrayal.

  “He did,” I whispered. He spent weeks on this. Did he know he wouldn’t be here forever? Sure he did. He was already old, and he had to know…

  Had he known the Sorrows bitch would turn on him? He had to have known, Mikhail taught me everything I knew about the Sorrows and their worship of the Elder Gods, their Houses where incense hung heavy in the air and women became hive-queens, their collective energies focused on bringing back the Elders through the veils that kept them from the «real» world. I had to go to Hutch only because I hadn’t smelled one before.

  Mikhail had to have known. So why had he trusted her? Why hadn’t he told me?

  Deal with what you have in front of you now, Jill. Quit stalling.

  Saul stepped into the bare space in the middle of the pentacle. I inhaled, deeply. Then I reached up and unclasped the ruby from my throat. Its sharp edges dug into my sweating palm as I slid past the Were. I stepped delicately over the double circle and turned to face him, my back to the altar. His face was shadowed, only the glitter of eyes and the glint of silver in his hair reflecting the spent light from the pentacle below.

  I held up the chain. The ruby dangled, bloody sparks drifting in its depths as it sensed the event looming toward me. “This is my line back.” My voice sounded normal, except for the pain riding each word. “It’ll get slippery, and it’ll fight you. Don’t let go. If you let go, I’m lost.”

  He nodded, solemn. Silver winked in one of his braids, his fingers brushed mine as he took the gem, its chain dipping and swaying. “I won’t.”

  Jill. Time’s wasting. I turned my back on him, walked the four steps to the altar. It was bluestone, quarried in Britain somewhere and shipped here on the hush-hush by one of Mikhail’s friends in “exports.” A simple thigh-high rectangle of stone, it resonated as I laid my hand on it, cold burning my fingertips. “O my Lord God,” I whispered. “Do not forsake me when I face Hell’s legions. In your name…”

  That’s the trouble. I’m not doing this in God’s name. I’m doing this for me.

  I hopped up on the altar and spent a few moments arranging myself. The chill of stone reached even through the leather pants, and my T-shirt was no barrier to it at all. I didn’t wear my weapons, except the one small knife with a leather-wrapped handle. I lay on my back, arranged my booted feet carefully, and wriggled my head a little until the silver charms didn’t dig so hard into my skull.

  My left hand was pale, my apprentice-ring glittering as I lifted it. The knife-hilt was in my right hand. I swallowed dryly.

  Don’t do it, Jill. Don’t You know what this is like. Don’t do it. Find some other way.

  There was no other way. If there was, I wouldn’t be here.

  Determination took shape under my skin. A spark crackled from the ring, a point of lightning-white in the gloom. The spray-painted sigils ran wetly on the walls, whispering like bruised fingers rubbing each other. By now the door of the room would be invisible from the outside, sealed shut. Inside, womblike dark was broken only by the eerie glow of the silver pounded into the pentacle’s lines.

  Go for the quick tear, Jill.

  My breath whooshed out past my teeth. I set the knife-edge against my palm and cut.

  The smell of blood exploded in my nose. Bile scorched the back of my throat. I dropped the knife to the side, heard it clatter behind the altar, and whipped my left hand out as the scar tightened on my wrist, rumbling a low dissatisfied note.

  An arrow of etheric force from my palm smashed into the ruby, an attraction older than time. Blood calling to a bloody, blood-sensitized gem. My back arched, and the rope of force tautened.

  Saul had caught the other end. It strained, and I sensed him going down to one knee inside the pentacle, his fist tight around the ruby and blood—my blood, transferred through space—welling slick and hot between his fingers. He leaned back against the pull, and I dropped—

  — into howling wind, buffeting increasing as I fell, a scream like the slipstream past a jet’s windows filling the world. Falling, naked flesh stung by air turned hard by velocity. It was dark, the utter dark of blind closed eyes at the bottom of the sea at night.

  In this space there is no up or down, despite the sensation of falling. We call it between because it is; between life and death, earth and Hell, physic
al and spiritual.

  Between present and past.

  The greatest danger is forgetting who and what I am, falling into chaos and dispersing, the psyche unable to contain itself without an outside border. But the bracelet of agony closed around my wrist, crimson light spilling between my fingers as the etheric copy of the jewel closed in Saul Dustcircle’s fist almost snapped free of my grasp. A long huuuuuuuuuuungh! of mental effort burst out of me, the taste of copper filling my mouth to the brim, and I swallowed. With the jerk of arrested motion came the consciousness of who I was, what I was doing here, what information I sought.

  Time means less than nothing in this space, and so does distance. I became an arrow, translated between one spot and the next without the benefit of moving, the reflex of a physical body turning my stomach inside-out. Gagging, choking, trying desperately to remember that I was not in a real body but between and therefore without a goddamn stomach to reject food, I slammed through the barriers and found myself in a howling ash-choked wasteland with pale copies of skyscrapers glittering through a fog that tore into agonized screaming faces at my approach. Flying, through walls and jets of bright psychic moments crystallized by emotion, until the location that pulled me came into view.

  It was a mansion, its physical shape common enough for the super-rich and paranoid. Its etheric shape, though, was a howl of suffering and pleasure in that suffering, the psychic fume of death and corruption like the belch of an old cancerous dragon, tinted with dark flame having its origin in hell. Into this maw I flashed, the not-me holding a bloody jewel that twisted like a live snake in my grip, trying to break free of this place of horror and flee back to its real physical home.

  The mansion swallowed me.

  There they were. The hellbreed was a pale sword of diseased brightness, and the rogue Were a twisted mass of fur and flesh, crouched at her feet. The images overlapped with Cenci’s face, hair whipping in pale strands as she fought to contain a massive force spilling through her, lips pulled back in a grimace of agony.

  It is its own kind of agony to see between. There is no difference, once you are sideways in that not-space, between the face and the mind behind it, the vessel and the wine. People become smears of reaction, hellbreed spreading vortexes of contagion, hunters straight disciplined arrows of brilliance each with a screaming child on the inside. It is a vision of inner truth that can drive you mad, if you have not been trained—and even then, sanity is not certain.

  Cenci knelt, the Were bleeding at her feet. The floor was tessellated patterns of darkness, black and white linoleum squares stretching to infinity. Don’t worry, she whispered to the hulk of shattered fur and animal growl. I’ll take care of you.

  The Were screamed with fury, but her slim strong arms came around him—and then, Navoshtay Niv Arkady came.

  A tidal wave of etheric force slammed into me, a bat hitting a baseball with the cracking of a sweet swinging-for-the-fences bonebreaking home run. The slippery line between my fingers slid a few inches, my hand loosening, opening, my self flung through nonspace, skidding for the edges of reality.

  If I went over that edge…

  I heard, from very far away, Arkady’s voice. I knew it was his because of the black weight of ice it carried, and the unmistakable stamp of black oily eyes and coppery skin, a hook nose and the smell of heatless acid fire. This is unacceptable. Each sibilant carried a dagger of ice, plunging for the beating heart of whatever living thing it could find. You are my vessel, and I will break you if I wish.

  Comprehension blazed through me as I lunged away from the sound of that voice. A hellbreed that old can sometimes see between, and if he caught me spying inside his secrets even Perry might not be able to call him off—

  The jaws of the mansion slammed shut as I streaked through, shoulder screaming in pain as the ruby pulled, and my fingers slipped again, hot blood torn loose from my hand in a painless gout as the gem squirted out of my slippery palm.

  Falling. I had gone too far, the cord sliding between nerveless fingers, stunned and dazed by the impact.

  Comprehension flashed through me too late, a map of cause and effect stretching back to one image—slim white arms, bleeding from a hellbreed’s claws, clasping with more than human strength as a red-haired man struggled and screamed in agony, his flesh cracking and madness bleeding through.

  I fell. And fell. Heart stopping, brain bleeding, breath turned to a death-rattle, I fell.

  And was caught, deceleration slapping hard against every atom of me.

  — come back—

  I hung pinned for excruciating eternal moments like a butterfly, the world wheeling underneath with a sound like rushing hungry waves. Then another jolt, as someone wrapped both fists around a bloody gem and hauled with every muscle and erg of strength, pulled until lungs and heart both strained, eyes bulging and a cougar’s coughing roar smashing against spray-painted walls, a pentacle shifting silver and the line snapping, ripping, tearing me back into a body that glowed with a spiky clear aura, a blot of shining darkness on its right wrist like a live coal.

  The part of me that went between slammed back into this body, convulsing, choking, flung sideways like a rag doll, falling—

  — until my head smashed into the wooden floor. I lay crumpled in front of the altar, hearing my own hoarse screams as my legs jittered and flopped.

  The retching eased, every muscle in my body seizing up and relaxing in waves. I could finally breathe again. I lay against the altar, my eyes closed, vibrating with pain. The scar pulsed, a wave of sick delight spilling up my arm and curling down my back, as if a warm, manicured hand had just stroked along my spine, a linen cuff touching my skin gently.

  Of as if a scaled tongue too wet and warm to be human had touched the vulnerable hollow behind my ear.

  I flinched, without the energy to cower away. Got myself up on hands and knees, my left hand singing a thin note of pain before the cut, sucked bloodless, closed. I realized, through the ringing noise in my head, that Saul was calling my name, his voice hoarse as if he’d been shouting a while.

  “Goddammit, answer me!” He sounded frantic, and the silver light pulsed as if he’d tried to step over the pentacle’s borders. It held fast, singing a warning note of crystalline power.

  “Hold… on…” I managed through a fresh set of retches and the howling in my head. It was a good thing I hadn’t had breakfast.

  He subsided, but the rumbling growl coming from him shook the walls. He was one unhappy Were.

  Well, I’m not too happy myself. I struggled for a laugh and couldn’t find one.

  My arms and legs trembled, as if I’d just pulled through a fever. I managed to sit up, propping myself against the altar, and made the gesture that released the double-circle and the pentacle. Silver light folded away, its hum diminishing as it bled into the ground.

  Saul’s feet slid and slipped in the spreading pool of my blood as he launched himself, the silver glow turning bloody as he broke the weakening barriers and landed next to me, almost crashing into the altar. He fetched up hard and went to his knees, grabbed my shoulders, and shook me, my head hobbling back and forth. Sounds came out of him that I only vaguely recognized as words. I was too busy shaking, choking back more retches, and hearing the roaring noise of between fade too slowly out of my ears.

  I’d made it. The knowledge I’d brought out of the space between thrummed in my veins, spilled through my head, and the whole monstrous pattern became clear.

  I began to cry as Saul cupped my face in his bloody hands, the ruby a hard hot edge against my cheek. I sobbed until my ribs ached, howling, and when he kissed me I couldn’t stop weeping but I also started to scream, and he swallowed my cries as I found out I was once again alive.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  I splashed cold water on my face again, flung my head back. A charm chimed against the mirror, whipping at the end of a long strand of hair. The phone shrilled, and I reached it just as Saul appeared in my bedroom door. My guns la
y on the nightstand, each with a full clip and one in the chamber.

  It was Harp. “We’ve got him, Jill. His name’s Billy Ironwater, and he hails from Connecticut. He went to visit kin in upstate New York—the Alleghany pack—and disappeared about half a year before murders started popping up, murders that until now have been ‘lost’ in a stack of paperwork. The Alleghany canines have been looking for him and running up against blank walls. Most of those walls lead back to hellbreed, and in that state it only means one thing.”

  I felt the click of a pattern slide under my skin, resounding in my bones. “Arkady,” I breathed. I couldn’t call him anything else, now. Not when I had brushed him between and seen his true face.

  “Yeah. We’re in the barrio, at the Criz in the Plaza. Can you bring Saul? We’ve found a trail, and we need him. The entire Were population except for cubs is on this.” She was straining and eager, now that she had her prey in sight. Now it was time for the hunt, and all uncertainty was over.

  It was a relief. My brain slid into overdrive, the plan crystallizing in a moment. It was a good plan, and might even get me out of this alive. “I’ll give him my car keys.” Shocked silence rang on the line. I slid one gun into its holster, then the other. “What? I can’t go into the barrio, I’m a gringa. Besides, I’ve got shit of my own to do.”

  “You’re giving him your car keys?” She sounded, for once, taken aback. The hard note of glee was gone.

  I felt sorry for raining on her parade. “How else is he going to get down there in time? This is worse than you think, Harp. Get moving; he’ll catch up.” I slammed the phone down and turned to Saul. “Harp needs you, down in the barrio. They’ve found a trail, and just found out who our mystery boy is. Name’s Billy Ironwater and he’s a canine Were from Connecticut.” My hand shot out, and I tossed the jingling clatter of my spare set of car keys at him. I picked up my next spare leather trenchcoat from the bed, shook it experimentally, and shrugged into it. I’d put in my tiger’s eye earrings, and they tapped my cheeks as I shook my head, freeing my silver-laden hair from the collar of the coat. The blessing in the stones flashed blue for a moment, subsided.