He wasn't there. He's gone. Really gone. I told that voice to go away. It went without a struggle, but promised to return and taunt me the next time I tried to sleep.
At least some things in my life were consistent.
"That's apparent." She sighed, looking down at the heaped files on her desk. One stray dark strand of hair had fallen into her face, shocking in a woman of Gabe's precision. Her sidearm was briefly visible as she rubbed at the back of her neck with both hands, massaging away a constant ache. Her eyes were wider than I'd seen them in a while, but at least she'd lost the cheesy pale color in her cheeks. "Gods. I'm so sorry, Danny."
"Don't worry," I repeated, suppressing the flare of irritation. She's worried about me, she's my friend, she doesn't deserve my bad mood, I told myself for the fifth time, leaning back in the chair and shifting my gaze to the bottle of brandy. Gabe had offered us all a medicinal swig and I'd taken it, even though it might have been water as far as my new physiology was concerned. Jace had actually taken three long drafts before capping the bottle and handing it back to her. "At least it tells us a few things."
Jace took a long slurp of his coffee, holding the plasticine cup gingerly. "What does it tell you, Danny?" He sounded only mildly interested. His face was set and white, blue eyes bloodshot and livid. The bones on his staff moved uneasily, one clacking against another. Fever-spots burned high up on each cheek.
I appeared to have frightened them both. I supposed when the feeling of relief and crazed joy at daring the borders of Death again wore off, I would be frightened too. But I didn't have the good sense or manners to be scared right now. I felt oddly as if I'd won a victory.
There were only a few things that could turn an apparition into a ravening, hungry, vengeful ghost, most of them having to do with soul-destroying torture before the act of death. Ritual murders—what you might call "black magick," Power gained through the expense of torturing and killing another sentient being—and genocides were high on the list. So was being attacked and contaminated by a Feeder—a psychic vampire. Among a population where Power was so common and so frequently used, it stood to reason that some would develop pathology in their processing of ambient Power and need to siphon off vitality from those around them, feeding on magickal or psionic energy in ever-increasing doses, until they got to the point where they could drain a normal person in seconds and a psion in minutes, depriving them of the vital energy needed to sustain life. Most Feeders were caught and treated while young, able to live out normal lives as psions with early intervention. When an older psion started to exhibit Feeder pathology, early intervention was key as well.
But Feeders didn't tear their prey apart. At least, not physically.
It looked like a ritual murder to me, but it was too soon to tell. Whatever it was, Christabel Moorcock had suffered something so horrible even her ghost was insane with the echoes of the act.
"Well." I propped my boots up on Gabe's desk, picked a sliver of tile out of my hair, dropped it in her overflowing wastebasket. "It tells us we're dealing with some serious shit. That's nice to know. If we can assume we're dealing with a ritual murder, which would be my first guess, it also tells us that whatever was done to her reverberates after death. So that narrows down the type of magick we're hunting. It tells us that someone is very, very determined; it tells us that a lot of preparation and time went into this. So there are some clues lying around. Nobody can work a magickal operation like that with surgical precision; there's always some sloppy fucking mistake. I learned that doing bounties." I deliberately did not look at Jace, though it was an implicit nod to him. He'd been my teacher, after all; had taught me more about bounties in a year than I could learn on my own in five.
"Great." Gabe rested her elbows on her desk, finally stopping the rubbing at her neck. The white rings around her eyes were starting to go away. I smelled pizza—someone must have decided to grab a quick dinner here. It reminded me I was hungry. As usual. "Caine's having a rucking fit that you destroyed one of his body-bays. The holovids are going to be all over this, Danny. And if word gets out you're working on it, the sharks will go into a frenzy."
"He'll get tax compensation and the Hegemony HHS will step in since his body-bay was destroyed during a routine investigation." My tone sharpened. "And nobody cares what I work on."
I was surprised by Jace's snort. He took down half of his scalding coffee in one gulp, reached for the brandy bottle and, apparently changing his mind in midreach, settled back again. The flimsy folding chair squeaked. "Oh, really? You're the Danny Valentine, world-class Necromance who retired rich at the top of her game after a hush-hush bounty hunt that nobody can dig up any information on except for the Nuevo Rio Mob War. Of course they're going to eat it up. I'd be surprised if there weren't reporters covering your house already, Danny."
He forgot to mention that I was the Necromance that had raised Saint Crowley the Magi from ashes, as well as worked on the Choyne Towers disaster. And my recent string of bounties had been profiled on a holovid show. Gabe was right, if it surfaced that I was working on the case all hell might very well break loose. Plus, it would be bad for the cops to admit they'd had to bring in a freelancer.
"Fuck." I took a long swallow of the scorching mud that passed for coffee around here. Decided to change the subject. Accentuate the positive, so to speak. "So we've got more information than we had before, and we have a direction."
"What direction?" Gabe asked.
"Rigger Hall." I shivered. "Nightmare Central." Remember. Remember. Remember. The memory of the apparition's soulless chant chilled me as much as the thought of Christabel's note. I didn't want to remember Rigger Hall. I had done very well for years without remembering. I wanted nothing more than to continue that trend.
Silence crackled between us. The paper on her desk shifted uneasily, stirred by something other than wind.
"What happened there, Danny?" Gabe looked miserable. The chaos of ringing phones and crackle of uneasy Power outside her cubicle underscored her words. The Ceremonial next door swore softly and started over again, I heard the click-whirr of a magnetic tape relay. "The inquiry was sealed, it would take a court order to open it, and that means more publicity. I'm supposed to keep this as quiet as possible. Once the press sinks their teeth in, we'll be lucky to avoid a rush of copycats and Ludders attacking psions."
She was right. We would be lucky if nobody found out about it and was tempted to do a little cleansing-by-murder. And the first victim had been a normal. If there was even a hint that a murder of a normal had been committed by a psion, people got edgy.
Most psions were well able to defend themselves from random street violence, even the idiots who didn't take combat training. But still, it wore on you after a while, all the sidelong looks and little insults. We were trained in Hegemony schools, tattooed after taking Hegemony accreditation, and policed both internally and externally, but normals still feared us. We were useful to the Hegemony and a backbone source of tax funding as well as invaluable to corporations, but none of that mattered when the normals got into a snit. To them, we were all freaks, and it never did to forget that for very long, if at all.
I said nothing, staring at the brandy bottles and their amber liquid. One bottle was almost empty. Inside it, the liquid trembled, responding to my attention.
Jace hauled himself up to his feet, scooping up his staff. "I'm gonna go check for reporters outside." He was gone before I had time to respond.
I watched him vanish and looked back to find Gabe frowning at me. "What?" I tried not to sound aggrieved, shifted my boots on her desk. My mouth tasted grainy with the glass and porcelain dust from the morgue bay.
"He's upset," she informed me, as if I didn't already know. "What's going on with you two, Danny?"
"Nothing," I mumbled, taking another scalding sip of coffee. "He stays at my house, does bounties with me. He sticks around, but… nothing really, you know. I can't." I can't touch him. I won't let him touch me.
; Her frown deepened, the crow's-feet at the corners of her eyes deepening as well. "You mean you haven't…" Her slim dark eyebrows rose as she trailed off and examined me as if I'd just announced I wanted a genderchange and augments.
"I don't know what it will do to him." My left shoulder gave one muted throb that sent a not-unwelcome trickle of heat down my spine. And he's not Japhrimel. Every time he tries to touch me, all I can think about is a fucking demon. Ha, ha. Get it, fucking a demon? "Can we not talk about my sex life, please?"
"He gave up his Mob Family for you. Just walked away from it. From everything." And he's human. She didn't say it, but I heard it clearly nonetheless. Even someone she considered a traitor was better than me mourning a demon, apparently.
"Rigger Hall," I cut across her words. The nearly-empty brandy bottle jittered slightly on the edge of her desk, paper raffled again. "I don't know a lot, Gabe. But what I do know, I'll tell you."
She stared at me for a long fifteen seconds, her dark eyes fathomless, her emerald sizzling with light. Her aura flushed an even deeper red-purple. "Fine. Have it your way, Danny. You always do anyway." She leaned back in her chair, the casters squeaking slightly, and plucked the cigarette from behind her ear. In blatant defiance of the regs, she flicked out her silver Zijaan and inhaled, then sent twin streams of smoke out through her nostrils. A flick of the wrist, and a stasis-charm hummed into life, the smoke freezing into ash and falling on her desk. It was a nice trick.
I swallowed dryly. "Rigger Hall." The words tasted like stale burned chalk. "I was there from… let's see, I was tipped from home foster care to the psi program when I was five. So I would have been there, clipped and collared, for about… eight years before the inquiry." I shuddered. My skin prickled with phantom gooseflesh again.
I looked at my right hand, twisting itself further into a claw. It ached, not as much as it had, but still… My perfect, poreless golden skin was tingling in instinctive reaction, my breath coming short and my pulse beating hot and thready in my throat.
"Hades," Gabe breathed, a lungful of smoke wreathing her face before falling, dead ash, onto the papers drifting her desk. "Eddie does the same thing. What happened?"
"The Headmaster was a slimy piece of shit named Mirovitch." My breath came even harsher. My voice was as dry-husky as it had been right after the Prince of Hell had tried to strangle me. "He was part of the Putchkin psi program. Got a diplomatic waiver to come over and reform the Hegemony program with Rigger as an experimental school. What nobody knew was that he was a Feeder, and had been for some time. He was well-camouflaged, and he didn't want to be cured. Instead, he wanted his private playground, and he got it."
"A Feeder?" Gabe shivered. "Gods."
"Yeah. He was slick, and we were just… just kids. It was…" For a moment my voice failed me, sucked back into my throat. I set my coffee cup down on the floor beside my chair, feeling the floor rock slightly underneath me. Or maybe it wasn't the floor—maybe I was shaking. "It was really bad, Gabe. If you stepped out of line—if you were lucky—you got put in a Faraday cage in a sensory-dep vault. It was… A couple of the kids committed suicide, and Mirovitch made one of the Necromance apprentices sleep in the room that… He went insane and clawed his own eyes out. They wrote it up as an incorrectly-done training session."
Her eyes were round, disbelieving. "Why didn't anyone—"
"He paid off the Hegemony proctors. Had a profitable little sexwitch stable going on the side, could afford to hand out cash… and other bribes. And if any of the kids really pissed him off, he signed the forms to turn you into a breeder." I shivered again, rubbed at my left shoulder, my eyes blinded with memory.
Gods. If there was any justice in the world, the memories would have faded. They hadn't.
Once, my roommate had tried to tell her social worker what was going on inside Rigger Hall's hallowed walls. She'd paid for it with her life. It was ruled a suicide, of course—but sometimes even a kid has the guts to take her own life rather than be pushed into the breeder program.
Roanna's body hung tangled on the wires, jerking as the electricity zapped her dying nerves, smoke rising from her pale skin, her long beautiful hair burning, stinking. The streak of the soul leaving her body, as if it couldn't wait to be finally free—and the sick-sweet smell of flesh roasted from the inside. The Headmaster's fingers dug into my shoulder and knotted in my hair, squeezing, pulling, as he forced me to watch. I did not struggle; I did not want to look away.
No. This I would remember. And I swore to myself that one day, somehow, I would get my revenge.
The spike of pain from my shoulder brought me back to myself. Phones rang, people spoke in low voices. It was a normal world going on outside the cubicle—or as normal as the parapsych squad of the Saint City police ever got, I supposed. I reached for the brandy bottle, uncapped it, and inhaled the smell since the booze would do me no good. The liquid slopped against the sides of the bottle. I didn't even try to hold my hand steady.
Of course, the kids who went to Rigger didn't have anyone to fight for them. We were the orphans and the poor; most of our parents had given us up to the Hegemony foster program as soon as we tested high enough on the Matheson index. The rich kids and the kids with families went to Stryker, with the middle-class families receiving subsidies to defray the costs of a psion's schooling. And of course, you could run up a hell of a debt after your primary schooling taking accreditation at the Academy up north, but that was different. If you didn't have a family or a trust fund, your primary school was the closest Hegemony boarding school to your place of birth. Period, end of story, full stop.
I took another deep inhale. I am an adult now. I am all grown up. I can tell this story. "The story I heard goes like this: Finally some of the students banded together. Mirovitch was eerie, he could always tell who was making trouble… But some of them got together and… I heard they cracked the shields and the school security codes, slipped their collars, and caught him in his bedroom fucking a nine-year-old Magi girl. I heard later—now this is all rumor, mind you—that one of the Ceremonial students had turned herself into a Feeder and killed him that way, in a predator's duel." My teeth chattered. Chilly sweat seemed to film my entire body, gray mist threatening my vision. The sound of everything outside Gabe's cubicle seemed very far away. If you go into shock there's nobody to bring you out. You are stronger than this, you are all grown up now. Focus, dammit!
The chattering shakes receded. "You can't imagine the fear." I stared at the drift of gray ash on her desk. "Or the things that went on. Some of the students stooged for him. Those were the worst. They would avoid punishment by ratting on the others, and they were sometimes worse than he was. The beatings… They would turn up the collars and administer plasgun shocks…" I'd had scars, before I'd been turned into a hedaira. Three thick welts across my back, and a welted burn scar along the crease of my lower left buttock. No more. I didn't have the scars anymore. I had perfect, scarless golden skin.
Then why are they aching? Three stripes of fire down my back, the red-hot metal pressed against my skin, my own frantic screams, the leather cutting into my wrists, the trickle of blood and semen down my inner thighs…
I am all grown up. I set my jaw, shook the memories away. They didn't want to go, but I was stronger.
For now. When I tried to sleep, we'd see how far I'd gotten.
"Why would Moorcock write that down?" Gabe stubbed the cigarette out in a pocked scar on top of her desk. Her face was caught between disgust and pity for a moment, and I felt the old tired rage rise up in me. If there is anything in the world I hate, it's pity.
"I don't know." I was miserably aware that phantom gooseflesh was trying to rise through my skin. My right hand twisted even tighter, straining against itself, shaped into a knotted claw. Black molecule-drip polish gleamed on my nails. "But I'm going to find out."
"Danny." She pushed herself up to stand behind the desk, her palms braced, bending over slightly to look me in the face. Her
sleek dark hair was mussed, and her eyes were dilated, probably catching my own fear. "If I'd known, I wouldn't have asked you. I wouldn't—"
"But you did." I rose, my chair legs thocking solidly into the peeling linoleum floor. "And I owe you. You've done your duty, Gabe. Now it's time for me to do mine."
I didn't think it was possible, but Gabe turned pale. The color spilled out of her cheeks as if tipped from a cup. "It wasn't duty, Danny. You're my friend."
"Likewise." And I meant it. She had her own scars—four of them, on her belly, where Santino's claws had ripped through flesh and inflicted a wound even a Necromance couldn't heal, though we who walked in Death were second only to the sedayeen in healing mortal wounds. I was willing to bet Gabe had her own nightmares too, even if she was a very rich woman who played at being a cop. "Why do you think I came down here?"
No, she didn't play. Gabe was good at what she did, working on homicides for the Spook Squad, tickling the dead victims into telling her who killed them. She had a gift. She was the best detective they'd had in a good two decades, ever since her grandmother retired.
"Danny—"
No. Please, gods, no. Don't let her go all soft on me. I can't take that.
"I gotta go." If I stayed here much longer I'd start telling her other things, things she didn't need to know. Things about Rigger Hall, and things about me. "Call me if anything breaks, I'm going to go start looking around. Can you courier copies of the files to my house?"
"You know I can," she said. "Danny, I'm sorry."
Me too, Gabe. Me too. "See you soon, Spooky." I got the hell out of there.
Chapter Nine
Jace was waiting for me downstairs. "You okay?" he asked, as I pushed open the door to the ancient parking garage. There was an auxiliary exit here to the other side of the block, and holovid reporters wouldn't be able to catch us. There was already a swarm of them drifting across the front steps of the station house. I didn't envy Gabe having to give a press conference, but the holovids probably loved her.
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