A Were pyre is lit with the peculiar practical sorcery they use. The flames aren’t crimson, or black, or any of the spectrum of hellfire, banefire, or levinbolt flame. A Were pyre burns clean and hot, and it is white, with a dancing leaping thread of joyous yellow in its heart.
Saul Dustcircle stood beside me after lighting the wet wood. The tapering rain hissed and splatted, underlit white smoke billowing as the Weres lifted their voices in an ancient chant wishing peace to the departed. If you have ever heard it, you don’t need it translated. It is the very color of grief.
Navoshtay Siv Cenci, her white arms closed around the slumped body of a Were, made no sound as the flames crawled through her flesh.
And I don’t want to talk about that anymore.
Chapter Thirty-one
Harp’s jaw jutted tensely, and the feathers rebraided in her hair fluttered. She wasn’t speaking to me.
The platform was a chaos of noise and activity. Bright sunlight glittered on the ranked cars—Weres very rarely fly. They don’t like it, so it was the train for all three of them. Harp and Dominic would drop Saul off near the Rez and use the rest of the trip to eat up a few days of recuperation time. They deserved it.
Harp and Dom had finished the small mountain of paperwork to report an interstate major paranormal event, and I would get a lump sum from the FBI’s backstairs funding. With a little bit of fudging, the official story held up; a rogue Were was put down and a meddling hellbreed toasted. Cenci wasn’t mentioned except in passing. All in all, it was a neatly tied package.
Perry still hadn’t called me.
Dominic glanced at Harp, who had drawn away down the platform. “She’ll get over it,” he murmured to me. “Thank you, Jill. I mean it.”
Same old Dominic, still smoothing things over for her. I nodded, silver shifting in my hair and my dagger earrings swinging. The bright sun was an excuse to wear wraparound shades, and I’d left the sunsword, blackened and still icy, at Galina’s. If it ever recharged enough I might use it.
Or I might not. I shuddered at the thought. My replacement black leather trench creaked slightly with the movement, and I had my next pair of boots on. I hoped I could get through a week without bleeding on them.
Then again, the town had quieted down enormously. Maybe my reputation was finally scary enough to keep it that way. “Don’t mention it, Dom. Why don’t you come out some time when there’s not an impending apocalypse? It’d be nice to just have a barbecue or something.” My tone was far too falsely bright. I coughed into my hand, as if my throat was still troubling me.
“Sometime.” Dom grinned. “I’d better go get Harp on the train. She’ll call you in a few weeks.”
I doubted it. She wasn’t the forgiving type, and my putting a hellbreed on a Were pyre must have rubbed her hard the wrong way. Probably some other Weres, too.
I don’t care. It was the right thing to do.
At least Dom agreed with me, in his own quiet way. Saul… he didn’t say much one way or the other. It could have been that I was avoiding him.
If could have been meant definitely, that is. “See you, Dom.”
He gave me a salute, sketching the motion with two fingers, and turned away. Harp had moved farther down the platform, and I saw him slide an arm over her shoulders as he hustled her onto the train. They were a beautiful couple, I saw a few admiring glances tossed their way.
Saul stood with his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket. His eyes were on my face.
I studied him behind the sunglasses. My heart hurt. My head hurt. The pain ran through me.
“I guess this is goodbye,” I said brightly. Blinked furiously behind the shades.
He shook his head a little, glancing across the platform behind me. The silver wheel and the twisted unrecognizable bracelet threw back sharp darts of reflected light. I tried to memorize everything about his face, storing it up like a thief.
“Take care of yourself,” I added. I babbled. Like a complete idiot.
His jaw set, his mouth thinning. He nodded, privately, as if wrapping up a long internal conversation.
Saul’s right hand came out of his pocket, and he held up something I had to squint at to make sense of. The shades didn’t help, and neither did the water in my eyes.
It was a leather cuff, with buckles. Just wide enough for a wrist; for my wrist. He held it out, and I took it. I was helpless not to, my hand just flew up and grabbed it.
“That should last you longer than the copper.” He stuffed his hand back in his pocket and cocked his head, regarding me. The departure announcement began blaring in the background, as last goodbyes were said all around us and people hurried to file onto the train. “When it gets worn or the buckles snap, I’ll make you a new one.” His voice dropped, as if he had something in his throat too. I have to go home. My mother deserves to hear from me about… everything.”
“I know,” I jumped in. “Don’t make it worse. Just go. Get the hell out of here.” Don’t go. Stay. Please, stay.
But I couldn’t say it. I closed my teeth against the words. There were so many reasons why he shouldn’t stay. He was Were, and I was human—tainted with hellbreed.
Corrupted, even if I retained my soul. No matter how hard I fought it, I was going to Hell eventually. And I’d just had an object lesson on what could happen to Weres once they tangled with anything hellbreed.
It wasn’t fair. It was monstrously, hideously, absolutely unfair.
It doesn’t matter, I told myself. God, just make him go. Keep him safe.
His eyebrows drew together, stubbornly. It just made him handsomer, the richness of his skin almost too real under the sunlight. “I have to say something.”
Oh, Christ. Don’t draw this out. “Just go, will you?”
“I’m going.” His shoulders hunched. “But I’m coming back. You can’t cook worth a damn.”
With that he was gone, flowing away with the peculiar Were economy of motion. I stayed nailed in place, buffeted by a stream of people who were heading for the exits now that everyone was safely stashed on the train. When his feet left the platform and he hopped up into the carriage Dom and Harp were already in, the snap of his feet leaving the ground of my city echoed in my chest like a broken guitar string.
I turned blindly away. It was a miracle I was able to make it to the parking lot and my Impala with the cuff clenched in my sweating fist. The tears blurring my eyes and sliding down my cheeks didn’t stop even when I dropped into the driver’s seat. I put my head down on the steering wheel and heard the lonely sound of a train whistle blaring as the five o’clock special pulled out of the station and chugged out of town.
Epilogue
Life went on. I cleaned out a nest of Assyrian shape-shifters, busted a ring of child-pornographer Traders, and wasn’t thrown out of Mickey’s the next time I ventured in for beers with Avery. Theron, the Were bartender, simply nodded to me from the smoky dark lounge in back. I actually got to have beers with Ave every week, and we even went to see a horrible movie about zombie-slayers once. It was that calm. Unfortunately, I caught myself playing with a knife-hilt halfway through the film, and one of the supporting actors had shoulder-length dark hair and broad shoulders, not to mention a supple grace that was human enough to bring tears to my eyes. Avery didn’t notice.
The weeks rolled by, and it came time for the payment. I finally nerved myself into a visit to the Monde on a gray Saturday night when fall had settled a blanket of sere monochrome over Santa Luz. Perry didn’t act surprised to see me—but then again, he never did. In fact, he didn’t talk much at all, beyond ordering me to strap him into the frame and use the long flat silver flechettes. The sounds he made were almost worth it, and I was so close, so close to cutting his throat. It would have been easy.
I could have killed him while he was strapped down. I could have.
I didn’t. I don’t know what stopped me, but I suspect it was the memory of silver in a man’s dark hair, and his hand holding mine a
s yellow-white flames burned and the Weres sang their ancient, sad melody.
Cenci wasn’t the only one a Were had saved. I could finally admit as much to myself.
By the time the hour was over, I was sweating while I cut, thinning black hellbreed ichor spattered over the frame and the white, white enamel floor of the room Perry reserved for his little games with me. I left him hanging in the frame, bleeding, and headed for the door, the flechette falling from my hand and chiming as it hit.
The edge was there, the temptation to kill him overwhelming. But he was strapped down, and if I murdered him now, or even tried to…
He spoke again. Just five little words. “Come back,” he whispered, the sound sliding through the air and kissing the scar with a finger of soft delight. “Finish the job.”
I did not pause. I ran, and his silky laughter followed me, falling from his bloody mouth. I knew his mouth was running with blackness because I’d punched him hard enough to make his lips a mess of meat.
When I finally got home that night I stood in a hot shower, sobbing and scrubbing at myself with coal-tar soap until I was raw all over, the water sliding down the drain turning ice-cold and running pink and red. I collapsed on my bed afterward, hugging sheets that still smelled faintly of a man’s smoky musk.
Nothing had changed.
Everything had changed.
No rest for the wicked. I cried myself to sleep, got up the next night, and went back to work. But not before I visited Mikhail’s grave with another bottle of vodka.
It was a relief to finally know I had not killed him. If I’d hung back, purposely waiting, on that night, it was only because I loved him. Had it been otherwise, I would have pulled the trigger on Cenci. You are either damned or you’re not, and if you’re not, you can stop worrying about your teacher’s death in a shitty little hotel room.
Whatever responsibility I carried for Mikhail’s death, it was not because I had deliberately robbed him of backup that night. I could swear that much with a clear conscience now, and if the keening infection of grief under my heart didn’t stop, at least it got easier to bear.
Things picked up after that. There was a scare about a scurf infestation moving up from Viejarosas to the south—Leon’s territory. We found a few arkeus who had a nice little Trader stable specializing in rape and extortion, busted it up. I took almost half a clip of heavy ammo before Leon knocked out one of the Traders. He told me later he’d thought I was a goner.
Not yet, I told him. I’m too mean.
He laughed, thinking I was joking.
There was the regular rash of exorcisms around Halloween, and I finally nabbed the hellbreed flooding the city with adulterated cocaine. Right after I beat him to a brackish pulp another one moved in to sell adulterated heroin, and I lost a few pints of blood teaching that hellspawn that if you were going to import drugs into Santa Luz, cutting them with shit wasn’t good business sense.
Then came damn near a month of almost-quiet, and I roamed the streets at night looking for trouble and not finding any.
It was a good feeling, but also a faintly unsteady one.
I came home on a chill winter night. The mountains in the distance were wearing their hoods of snow again, and as soon as I pulled into the garage I knew something was different. I slipped out under my closing garage door and padded around to the side entrance, silent as death.
The door closed quietly behind me. I had the whip loose and easy in my right hand, the Glock in my left, and I eased down the short hall, the warehouse creaking and booming with wind coming from across the desert, laden with cold and the smell of sage.
There was another smell. I sniffed cautiously, then deeper. My chest hurt with a swift deadly pain before ice closed the feeling away.
What the hell?
The lights were on in the long living room. I edged out into the open, caught a flicker of movement in the kitchen, and leveled the gun.
He didn’t even turn around. He wore a long-sleeved black thermal shirt and jeans, and he was barefoot. The sheaf of hair that used to touch his shoulders was shorter now, shorn, glowing red-black under the kitchen lights. He hummed a little as he added something to the saucepan.
My heart pounded so hard I thought I would faint. I actually considered it.
“It’s late,” Saul said over his shoulder. Silver glittered, threaded into his hair with red thread. He’d picked up a few more charms, and the glints looked good against the silky darkness. It would look even better once some of it grew out. “Or early, with you working the night shift and all. So I thought, omelets. Hope you like pepperjack cheese; it’s hard to find decent pepperjack back on the Rez. I was craving it. And hash browns. Baked, this time. You don’t have the right oil for frying them. Did you throw out everything in the fridge?”
My jaw was suspiciously loose. My ribs ran and boiled with pain that burrowed under and into every vital organ, but most of all my heart. I was having a heart attack. Jill Kismet, kickass hunter, dropping dead of cardiac arrest over an omelet.
He looked back down at the stove, the back of his neck oddly naked without a Were’s long hair. “It took a little longer to finish up out in the Dakotas than I thought it would. I was going to call, but then I thought you don’t answer your phone much.”
I dropped the whip. Closed my mouth with a snap, and kept staring at him as the leather slid onto the floor, metal flechettes tinkling.
He was in my kitchen. Again.
Oh, God, I am not strong enough for this.
He shut off the stove, picked up the pan. Ripped one omelet off onto a plate arranged just so on the counter, repeated the process with slightly bigger saucepan. Fragrant steam rose. “I’ll leave salt and pepper to your discretion,” he said, and I realized he sounded a little nervous, for the very first time.
I cleared my throat. That was the sum total of my conversational ability.
He turned, holding my battered plastic thrift-store spatula. “We’re going to have to talk about your taste in kitchen utensils, too.” His eyes met mine, dark and level, and he dropped his hand. The spatula dangled easily, loosely.
I summoned up every scrap of courage I had. “I’m no good at this sort of thing,” I managed, in a squeak that sounded more little-girl Minnie Mouse than confident hellspawn-murdering hunter.
“I got that,” he answered gravely. He didn’t look away.
My heart cracked open inside my chest. Please, God. The prayer was no more than that, an incoherent mass of longing right behind my breastbone like Monty’s indigestion. “I’m not a nice person.” I kill, Saul. I kill hellbreed and Traders and other nasty things. I’m corrupted. I’m tainted. You have no idea what I was, or what Mikhail made me, or what I am now. What I almost did, how close I came to handing over my soul to Perry. It’s not just in the stories that people get taken by hellbreed.
He sighed. Laid the spatula down on the counter. I remembered I was holding a gun, and holstered it. The creak of leather sounded very loud.
“Mikhail wasn’t the only man who gives a damn about you.” Saul said it very quietly. “No bargains, no deals. We’ll see what happens.”
One choked word struggled to get out. “Why?” Why me? Why this? Why couldn’t you have come here before Perry? Before I was teenage streetwalker with a serious rage problem? Before I was broken?
He shook his head slightly, as if I’d just asked a stupid question. “Because you need me. Because I want to,” he said softly, and because he was a Were and he said it so quietly, it made sense.
God help me, but it did make sense. He was here now, he was saying. He was right here. In my kitchen.
With omelets.
The bubble of tears broke in my throat. One slid down my cheek, hot and accusatory. “I don’t know how to do this.” That finished up all my ability to speak, because if I said anything else I was going to start screaming.
He shrugged. Picked up a plate, and I saw with a kind of mad hilarity that he even had a sprig of parsley st
uck in each neat mound of hash browns.
“It’s not that hard, Jill. You just sit down and eat something. Then we talk.”
“Urgh,” I managed, with a slight inquisitive sound at the end. What I meant was, talk about what?
And God have mercy on me, but he understood. He smiled, a sweet slow smile as he stood under the lights, and I lost every bit of good sense I had left.
“We can talk about anything, kitten. Come on, it won’t stay hot forever.”
Glossary
Arkeus : A roaming corruptor escaped from Hell.
Banefire: A cleansing sorcerous flame
Black Mist: A roaming psychic contagion; a symbiotic parasite inhabiting the host’s nervous system and bloodstream.
Chutsharak : Chaldean obscenity, loosely translated as “oh, fuck.”
Demon: Term loosely used to designate any nonhuman predator with sorcerous ability or a connection to Hell.
Exorcism: Tearing loose a psychic parasite from its host.
Hellbreed: Blanket term for a wide array of demons, half-demons, or other species escaped or sent from Hell.
Hellfire: The spectrum of sorcerous flame employed by hellbreed for a variety of uses.
Hunter: A trained human who keeps the balance between the nightside and regular humans; extrahuman law enforcement.
Imdarák : Shadowy former race who drove the Elder Gods from the physical plane, also called the Lords of the Trees.
Martindale Squad: The FBI division responsible for tracking nightside crime across state lines and at the federal level, mostly staffed with hunters and Weres.
Middle Way: Worshippers of Chaos, Middle Way adepts are usually sociopathic and sorcerous loners. Occasionally covens of Middle Way adepts will come together to control a territory or for a specific purpose.
OtherSight: Second sight, the ability to see sorcerous energy. Can also mean precognition.
Possessor: An insubstantial, low-class demon specializing in occupying and controlling humans; the prime reason for exorcists.
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