She jagged for the hall leading to the front door, skin peeling back from wasted muscle and the eyes cloudy with low reddish hellfire. Two of the four had been in sweats and T-shirts with ragged, gaping, bloody holes in the front, one was naked, and this one was in a babydoll nightie of cream-colored material, also torn in the front. The ragged holes in their rib cages and flayed holes in their bellies, splintered white ribs showing and tissue flapping free, spatters of blood and other fluids, told me things I didn’t want to know.
But first things first.
Since she was the last one up and moving around, I leapt on her halfway into the dining room. The impact knocked her down, bits of flesh splashing everywhere and the steady cadence of ’töng breaking for a thin half second before roaring back, like a radio coming in clear and strong through static.
The trick in putting down corpses hellbreed have taken control of is to either cause such massive damage the body can’t move anymore, or break the etheric connection between ’breed and body. If you’re dealing with more than one, you go for damage.
Which is always my favorite option, anyway. Call it a personality quirk.
Tangle of arms and legs. Splatter of stinking foulness, cold smoking fluid splashed in my face and I blew out through both nose and mouth, freeing the passages. I spend an awful lot of time wrestling around on the floor, getting leverage. Jujitsu is a godsend.
We rolled, and my right hand thrust into the stinking cavity in her chest.
Even if you suspect something so strongly, it’s still a shock to have it confirmed. Her heart had been removed. Gristle scraped my slipping fingers, the body twisted and lurched with inhuman strength. It reminded me of fighting zombies, though zombies are a different proposition. For one thing, they’re not impelled by a hellbreed’s sheer power and desire to cause hurt. No, zombies are just like maddened animals.
Corpses with a hellbreed pulling their puppet strings, on the other hand, are cunning and ruthless.
The thing that used to be one of the girls on the whiteboard snarled as my fingers closed around something hard and egg-shaped. The tissue around it grabbed with slippery, grasping fingers, and my own voice rose, cutting through the babbling, grinding, tearing sound of Hell’s language from a dead throat. I wasn’t praying—no, I was cursing, yelling each filthy word I knew and combining them automatically. I dug in its chest, my legs wrapped around it, and my left hand punched the rotting face repeatedly.
The egg-shaped hardness almost squirted free, greased with noisome ick. But I yanked, and meat tore apart. The body spasmed, its hellfire dimming. Shattered wood flew as we struggled.
My fingers crunched down, the scar singing a piercing high note, burrowing hot as a dollop of melted lead into my wrist. The egg slipped free. I wrenched it all the way out of the gaping hole in the body’s chest. Muscle and bone sagged aside, its frenetic activity snuffed out.
Harsh, ratcheting breathing filled my ears. It was my own. My pulse pounded. Cold sweat stood out all over me.
I shoved the body aside. Electric light from the fixture overhead was merciless, beating down like desert sun. The dining room was a mess—I’d had to fight while retreating down the hall, keeping them bottled up and away from the civilians out front. One of them could have gone out a window, if they’d gotten lucky. Or if I hadn’t kept them bottled so hard. The last one had been looking to escape, probably to get out and cause a little havoc for their master, since I’d just come across a huge violation of the rules.
Whoever it was had to know I’d be along sooner or later to check this out. Thoughtful of them to leave a calling card. I lay on the floor, chest heaving to get enough breath in, and lifted the bezoar.
It glimmered nastily, a smooth, nacreous gleam from the packed-tight hairthreads it was made of. Pulsing with unnatural life, slippery with a weird clear fluid that dripped upward and vanished into smoke, the thing nestled in my palm.
This little seed, planted in a body, would make controlling easier. It was also something I could use to track the ’breed responsible. You don’t see bezoar much; the act of destroying the body usually shreds them all to shit. Taking it out while the thing’s still wiggling is key.
I swallowed hard, forced down nausea, and gained my feet in a convulsive rush.
The dining-room table was in splinters. One of the chairs was still whole, the others not so lucky. Cold, jelly-thickening blood splattered, already decaying and stinking, on all four walls and the French door.
My left hand was already digging in one of my pockets. Out came a square of white blessed silk, a little dingy from time spent stowed away.
Boy Scouts aren’t the only ones who like to be prepared.
“Jesus.” My own raw whisper took me by surprise, bounced back from the walls. The whiteboard was cracked, knocked down to the floor and rolled on. I probably had dry-erase marker smeared all over my coat. “Jesus Christ.”
The silk went around the pulsing stone. The seeping liquid cringed from the blessing in the cloth. I had to use the breakfast bar between kitchen and dining room, laid the whole thing down and tied it up with quick gestures. Sorcery crackled on my fingertips, intent married to etheric force bleeding into the knots.
Most of the great hunter sorceries are sympathetic, echoes of a time when naked priestesses traced ley lines in dew-wet grass, using the earth’s force as the basis for the simple magical theories of attraction and repulsion. And, not so incidentally, using that same force to push the night back from human settlements. To keep the dark at bay. Every hunter is an heir to that time and those sorceries.
“Thou Who,” I found myself saying. Licked dry lips, continued. The Hunter’s Prayer unreeled, with the ease of so many repetitions: “Thou Who hast given me to fight evil, protect me; keep me from harm.” I skipped a bit, got to the important part. “O my Lord God, do not forsake me when I face Hell’s legions. In Thy name and with Thy blessing, I go forth to cleanse the night.”
A blue spark cracked. Two. The bezoar lay inert in a shield of white silk and blessing. A faint scratching sound came from the breakfast bar, and somewhere a hellbreed’s rage mounted, but my hands were steady. I finished the last knot. “Amen.”
Silence. The entire house was dead still. They were probably out there trying not to wonder what was going on. Sometimes I think it’s worse to wait; other times I’m sure it’s worse to see and know. After all, one of the more common responses to brushing up against the nightside is suicide.
A sharp pinch under my breastbone. I’ve lost good cops to the nightside. My cops, my eyes and ears, the people I protect. When you get down to it, there’s not much difference between the work I do and their jobs. It’s just a matter of degree.
Everything these days is just a matter of degree. It didn’t used to be that way.
A tiny noise. I whirled, clearing leather, and saw Jughead Vanner in the doorway to the hall. His jaw dropped and his hands were up. He was so pale he was almost transparent, and sweat filmed his skin. His pupils were dilated, and he looked halfway to shock.
I lowered the gun, carefully. Tried to swallow my heart. “What the hell are you doing?”
He blinked. His mouth worked like a fish’s. I holstered the gun, slid the wrapped, twitching bezoar into a pocket, and crossed the dining room in long swinging strides.
I grabbed his shoulders and shoved him all the way through the hall and across the living room. I’d gotten up a good head of steam, too, and when he hit the wall next to the barred window in the living room the impact jarred us both. “What. The fuck. Are you doing?”
“I… uh, I…” His mouth worked wetly. I shook him, shoved him back against the wall again. A thin thread of smoke teased my nostrils. The Talisman vibrated uneasily, tapping at my breastbone like impatient fingers.
“I said to stay at the perimeter! What about that did you not understand? God damn you, you could have been hurt!” I was yelling, full throat, and they could probably hear me all the way out by the fence. �
�When I say you stay, you motherfucking stay!”
I ran out of words and glared at him. My blue eye was dry and tingling, and I knew a crimson spark was dancing in the pupil’s darkness. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed convulsively. Dots of feverish red stood high up on his cheeks. I took a good look at him and swore, filthily. He shuddered at each word.
“Fucking stay right there, do not move,” I spat, and checked the house one more time. Forensics was going to hate me for this. The bodies had been all neat in a row, but now the bedroom hall was an abattoir and bits were scattered everywhere.
Unfortunately, you do have to rip them up sometimes. I was lucky to extract the seed of corruption from one of them, something I could use to track the hellbreed responsible. The last body lay tangled on the floor in the dining room, amid the shattered wreckage of the table. Her face was turned to the light, the mouth wrenched open in a long silent scream, and that’s the worst thing about corpses hellbreed have been playing with. They look like even death doesn’t stop the agony.
This was turning out to be a long goddamn night.
8
The Badger called in paramedics, and they treated Vanner for shock in an ambulance. “We kept hearing noises,” she said quietly, watching them. “He just got more and more nervous, then headed in. I had a job to do keeping the rest of them here.”
“You did fine.” I hung up, handed her cell phone back. “Four bodies. I want a full workup on whatever’s left of them. Find out which internal organs are missing. Find out who they are—”
“Already have, at least a bit. Student nurses from Saint Simeon. Pooling their rent, it looks like. Next of kin is going to be a bitch.” She looked like she was sucking on something bitter.
Each one of them was probably a parent’s pride and joy. The funerals were all going to have to be closed-casket. “Shit.” I blew out a long breath between my teeth. “Tell Piper not to release the bodies until I give the okay.”
It wasn’t going to be pleasant for the families. But that was the way it was.
She nodded. Sullivan stood with the blues in a huddle near the gate. The sound of male bullshitting had a high sharp note it doesn’t normally have, and the blues kept glancing at me. Short little nervous glances that skittered off the edge of my consciousness.
Vanner moaned, shapelessly. I looked at the house. A cloud of etheric bruising lingered, intensifying now that I’d unleashed sorcery inside its walls and ripped apart the bodies. One of the regular exorcists was going to have to come out and clean it. Probably Wallace, since Eva was on vacation and Benito was handling part of her caseload. Avery had enough to do keeping up with the police department. “Make sure Jughead gets one of the trauma counselors. And get Wallace out here for cleanup after Forensics is through.”
She nodded, digging out one of the tiny pads of paper she was always carrying. A pen appeared, and she made notes. “Jughead, trauma. No release on bodies. Wallace out for cleanups. His number’s still good?”
“The 3309? Hasn’t changed for eight years.” But the Badger’s thoroughgoing little heart wouldn’t let her take it for granted, and I knew as much. “Have I ever told you how much I love your eye for detail?”
“Don’t let Sully hear you say that. He thinks my body’s the only thing to love me for.” A flash of a grin, but her eyes were dark and grieving. “I tell him the line starts on the left. He thinks I should make exceptions for him.”
“Does your husband know Sullivan’s desperately in love with you?” I played along. It sounds callous, but when you see lives cut short and bodies strewn in pieces, it’s either gallows humor or screaming sobs.
I prefer the humor.
The Badger’s smile did not ease. “Oh, no. Frank would kill him. Then I’d have to break in a whole new partner. And I just got this one housebroken—”
“Are you taking my name in vain again?” Sullivan called. He detached himself from the knot of blues and ambled over. He didn’t look at my chest, where the Talisman was peeping out through its burnt hole. It was glowing, a fierce reddish gleam strong enough to read by if I was in a dark room.
I should calm down. I took a deep breath. It didn’t work.
“Of course not.” The Badger gave him a sweet smile. “Just talking about your bathroom habits. Anything else, Jill?”
“Phone records.” I stared at the house, my eyebrows drawing together. “See if we can piece together their visitors, or an estimated time of death. I’ll need to know what’s missing from the bodies before I—” My mouth shut, jaw clenching for a moment before I focused again. Or what’s not missing. “Have them rape-kitted, too.”
“Jesus.” Sullivan’s lips turned down and he fished out a worn pack of Lucky Strikes.
The Badger was solemn. Jughead moaned again, but quietly. It was anyone’s guess what had scared him more—seeing the decaying corpse up and moving around, or seeing me fighting it with inhuman speed.
I checked the sky, shuffled through everything I wanted to do, and got exactly nowhere. We were wearing toward dawn faster and faster, and all I could do was wait for Hutch to pull the references, wait for the autopsy to tell me what I should be suspecting.
Thrashing around without something more definite would only waste time and resources. Still… “I’ve got to get going. Buzz me when you’ve got something.”
The Badger nodded, waving me away. Sullvan tipped me a salute. Jughead Vanner made a thin muttering noise, and the EMT in the back of the ambulance with him spoke up. “Blood pressure’s fine. You’re going to be okay, kiddo.”
I wished I was that optimistic.
Mikhail’s headstone is on the northern side of Beacon Hill’s lush green, overlooking downtown and the mountains in the distance. The whole valley sprawls out, a vista as familiar as my own face in the mirror. I’d known, as soon as I saw the Talisman in the crushed paper box, that I would eventually end up here.
No use putting it off. And besides, better here than Perry’s nightclub. If I went into the Monde like this, there was no telling what would happen.
I’d stopped at the edge of the barrio for a bottle of Stolichnaya—have I mentioned how loose the liquor laws are on the nightside?—and when I uncapped it the colorless fume could be an excuse for the prickling behind my eyes. I took a long hit and poured him a good healthy shot. It splashed on the granite stone. A faint whisper of traffic in the distance, the lamps along the periphery and at intervals failing to make any dent in the night. Darkness hugged the ground here, hung between the trees in rubbery sheets. The water they dump all over this place every day is a great psychic conductor. Grief and longing roiled under the surface of the neatly clipped grass.
I crouched easily, took another mouthful from the bottle. Swallowed, relished the brief sting. “Hi.” A thin, breathy sound. “It’s me.” As if he wouldn’t know.
Here was one place I still felt young. I knew his ashes were carefully scraped up from the pyre the Weres built him, safe in an alabaster jar in Galina’s vault. But it was here at the gravestone that I felt his presence. I didn’t think he’d be a stickler for tradition and only hang around his ashes. Or maybe it was just that I needed him here, out on a hillside with the whole city spread beneath us and the vast dark sky above. At Galina’s, someone would be trying not to listen. And what could I do, wake her up in the middle of the night every time I wanted to talk to him?
I poured him another shot. The thin sound of the liquid hitting the stone vanished into the breeze, the river inhaling as dawn approached. I let out a long breath, my shoulders slumping a bit. A red gleam touched the puddle, hot and baleful even when reflected.
“So, yeah. I guess you’ve noticed the Eye. Perry dropped it off.” It didn’t sound like much when I said it out loud. But the night tensed around me. I glanced up. All quiet, trees standing watch over the soundly sleeping dead. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Misha.”
I could almost hear him. Bad feeling every day on this job, milaya. Is part of c
ontract.
Well, yeah, I knew that. Jeez. What would he really say to me?
It’s one of the hardest things to get used to. No matter how well you know someone, when they die you will never know exactly what they’d say. Especially if you loved them.
Especially if you still love them, deep in that room in your heart where you keep the only things that truly matter. The baggage you take to your own personal desert island, the exile called life all of us are born into.
The Church holds it as a point of doctrine that hunters don’t go to Heaven. Mikhail had been nominally Eastern Orthodox, with a few significant exceptions. I go to Valhalla, he had told me more than once. Where the fight is the play, like movie.
I’d only asked him once why someone from his part of the world would pick a Viking afterlife. Because, was his answer. Now stop the asking stupid question, milaya, and do your kata.
I found my free fingers were touching the Talisman’s sharp-scratching edges. The gem thrummed, the carved ruby at my throat warming as well. The Eye purred like a kitten under my touch.
I put my hand down with an effort.
“I never got to ask you why you did it. Why you fell for that Sorrows bitch.” I swallowed the rest of the question—why you didn’t stay with me. Why I wasn’t enough. Yet another thing I would never know.
The scar puckered and twitched, tasting the misery in the air. I hadn’t bothered to cover it again. “I guess it doesn’t matter.” The words were ashes. “Not like any answer’s gonna bring you back. But still.”
A rustle of movement. I was up, the bottle hitting the ground and my right-hand gun free, before the shape resolved out of the darkness and I recognized him. I reholstered the gun and waited while he came up the hill. It was a courtesy to make noise while approaching.
When his deeper shadow finally detached itself from the rest of the night, I pitched the words to carry. “I thought you were going to wait for me at home.”
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