The cellar was empty. The concrete floor was cracked and uneven in places, but I could see the marks where something very heavy had been scraped around.
There were other marks, too. A smear of something that was red paint, a different color from the faint bloodstains. And something else. A shapeless lump of material. Suede, its fringes lying dead and discarded.
Hot bile whipped the back of my throat. It was a good thing I hadn’t eaten. I would have spread every bite of it over the concrete floor.
A faint whispering sound. My head jerked up, tracking it. A rushing, like water. My blue eye pierced the etheric bruising for a second; I saw the geometric shapes of a hellbreed curse sparking and flowing in an intricate pattern.
The Talisman sang, a high piercing note. I immediately bolted for the steps, and that was probably what saved me. Because I smelled smoke, and the house overhead exploded with a dry wump that sucked a draft of cool air past me. I made the kitchen just in time to dive for the utility room as a wall of orange flame with blue wires at its edges burst through from the living room. The curse had triggered up on the top floor and moved down, probably to catch me like a rat in a rain barrel.
Another trap. I’d walked right into it, and I had a sneaking suspicion the owners of this place would be among the dead near the freeway.
And the hellbreed had moved Saul.
* * *
I dove out the back door a bare fraction of a second before the wall of hell-fueled fire coughed free. Rolled, came up and swept the yard with both guns. Nothing but the pale glare of fire in sunlight, sweeping up the brick like great, grasping, throb-veined hands, the flames oily and edged with blue. The heat was monstrous, crisping the grass as I skipped back. The board fence was smoldering.
Holy shit. I ran up against the boards, not quite believing what I was seeing. Survival took over, the guns were stowed, and I was on top of the fence in a heartbeat, balanced like a tightrope walker.
Something exploded. The concussion blew me off the fence. I flew, weightless, hit another fence hard, wood splintering in great jagged pieces. Glass shattered—the shock wave blew out windows in neighboring houses. I hit something else with a snapping crunch and found myself in the ruins of a kid’s swing set. The cheap metal had twisted and bent instead of breaking, or I’d have been wearing some of it through me.
It was broad fucking daylight. Next would come sirens and attention. I swore internally, struggled to my feet, and vanished.
24
The sun was sinking fast when my pager buzzed. I picked a sliver of glass out of my hair and sighed. Belisa sighed too, in the backseat.
I didn’t like that.
Of the four locations Perry had given me, three had evidence of Saul’s presence… and traps. I was now certain—the kind of cold certainty that settles on me halfway through a case—that the people who had lived in each place were all resting in the morgue.
The fourth locale, a dun-painted McMansion on the edge of the suburbs, had the carpet yanked up in the empty master bedroom, marks on the floor where a huge heavy object had been placed, probably brought in through the French doors. There were also five little guard-breed—little yappy things that looked like Lhasa Apsos with burning-red eyes. One of them had sunk vicious, needle-sharp teeth into my calf before I could break its neck. I would have worried about the sound of gunfire, except the mansion’s neighbors were far enough away that it didn’t matter.
Goddamn little dogs. Of course, if they were as large as German shepherds they’d be much more dangerous. They were just a demonic annoyance, especially if you had other ’breed or Traders to worry about.
But there hadn’t been anything bigger. I was chasing my own tail, goddammit.
I dug the pager out. They had to be moving Saul every few hours. I should have known they would, especially if Perry had any notion of where he was likely to be held. Now I was wishing I had cut him, and cut him deep.
That wouldn’t have led you to Saul. Of course, this isn’t doing a whole hell of a lot, either.
I found a Circle K and pulled into the lot. Glanced back at Belisa, made sure the collar was still snugly on. Here I was ferrying around a woman I should have killed on sight. God had a sick, sick sense of humor.
But I knew that. I’d known it since I was five years old.
“No sense,” I whispered to the pager’s glow. “This makes no fucking sense. As usual.”
But I was not quite being honest with myself. I had a bad bad feeling, down deep in my gut.
I dialed, it rang twice and she picked up. “Jill.”
“Hey, Badge. What do you have for me?”
She got right down to business. “You wanted to know about funky John Does in the last three weeks?”
“Yeah?” I tried not to feel like a bloodhound straining at the leash.
“Rosie and I have been digging all day. The short answer is, there’s none. But there’s something else.”
“Like what?” Her sense of the weird was almost as finely tuned as Carper’s had been. I shut my eyes at the thought of Carp, sleeping under a counterpane of green.
“Like disappearances up twenty percent. Rosie crunched some numbers. Adult disappearances are holding steady. It’s the kid ones that are accounting for the bump.”
“Huh.” If it was summer, the numbers might make sense. Kids get into trouble when school’s out, here as well as everywhere else.
But a spike of twenty percent? That was something. In winter too. “When did it start?”
“Let’s see… two weeks ago, missing persons reports did a sudden jump. Among kids too young to be runaways. We took a look at unsolved numbers in the last two weeks compared to unsolved over the last three years, and allowed for a certain percentage of retrievals—”
“Badge, you’re a wonder.” The sun slid below the horizon, and Santa Luz took its regular nightly breath before the plunge.
“Don’t I know it. And they’re up twenty percent, even accounting for variables in weather and unemployment. Does that help?”
Kind of. It tells me we are looking at a new high-level hellbreed in town, a hungry one. What were those evocation altars for? Just to keep me chasing my tail? To bring through someone else?
A sudden, blinding thought occurred to me. The victims I’d taken the bezoar from had to have been virgins, but it might have been a fluke or a crime of opportunity. In Anya’s territory, the virgin flesh might have been just to create extra punch in doing an evocation while the moon was wrong. Nothing pierces the walls of Hell like innocent flesh—and if they were attempting an evocation out of phase to bring someone else through, they’d need all the help they could get.
The pattern showed itself for a blinding moment. The scar buzzed on my wrist, etheric energy jolting up my arm. The bezoar, securely caged, twitched madly in my pocket as if someone was yanking at my coat. I looked up, and every sorcerous sense I had informed me shit was about to get ugly.
I didn’t need intuition to tell me that. All I had to do was look at the creeping dusklit shadows clustering up to my car. Those shadows had eyes like flat russet coins, and teeth that sparked with phosphorescence. They hunched and lunged through the shadows with the peculiar, crippled speed of the damned.
“Jill?” Badger said cautiously. “You still there?”
“Gotta go. Keep digging, give my best to Rosie. And thanks.” I hung up, drew my guns. One of the low twisted things leapt up on the trunk of the Pontiac, and the car’s springs groaned as it growled. Its muzzle twisted up, showing ancient, yellowed teeth. Its front paws were shaped like hands except for the two or three extra fingers, enlarged knuckles, and tarnished ivory claws. It dented the metal, and irrationally, all I could think of was the paint job.
“Son of a bitch,” I yelled, and launched myself forward. They melded out of the gathering dark, four of them, and spread out. Oh, this is gonna be fun.
At least I was sure I’d been poking around in the right way. They wouldn’t send rongeurdo
s—bonedogs—after me if I hadn’t been wandering around closer and closer to the truth.
The first one coiled down on its haunches, sprang with a deadly scraping of claws on concrete. I faded to the side, hit it twice at the top of its leap. It fell with a thump, steaming and scrabbling as blessed silver punched a hole in its shell and fragmented, filling it with poison.
The worst thing about the bonedogs is that they hunt in packs. The best thing? They die and stay down when you breach them with silver shot. And they never run by day.
Of course, that didn’t do me any good now.
As soon as I put that one down, another was leaping for me. I heard the little ding as the Circle K’s door opened, and I hoped nobody was coming out to take a look at the ruckus. You’d think even in the suburbs they would know to stay indoors when they hear gunshots.
My own leap was reflex, like a cat jumping back from a striking snake. I landed hard, already pitching to my right to draw them away from the convenience store’s entrance and whoever was stupid enough to be walking in or out. My boot flashed out, and the crunching shock of it meeting a ronguerdo’s face jolted all the way up to my hip, but I was already turning and shooting the other one with both guns. Pushing off, arms pulled close and angular momentum conserved enough to give me a spin. When I faced the other two my left hand held my whip instead of a gun, and I felt much more sanguine about the situation. The whip jingled as I shook it, assuring myself of free play. “All right, you sonsabitches.” My voice, a bright thread over the deep twisting Helletöng-accented growls. “Come get some.”
The Talisman thumped on my chest, its song of destruction hiking up a notch.
One hung back as the other slunk forward, head down and lips lifted over a slavering snarl. Yellow foam spattered, writhing into cracks in the pavement in long oily ropes.
I was bracing myself for the one in front to leap when the one behind flung its head up and howled.
The howl was answered. Eastward, another cry lifted into the night. Then, to the south, another one.
Oh, fuck. Kill them quick, Jill.
I swung forward. Hip leading for the whip work, the force uncoiling through me and flinging out through my hand, gun speaking at the same moment as the bonedog jerked aside to avoid jingling razor-sharp silver. The second, his duty done, leapt too, but I’d gotten the first right through his broad canine skull. He dropped like a stone and I had the last one to worry about.
The last one was the smartest. He looked at me, those eyes widening and turning bright crimson instead of a low punky russet glow. The sky was indigo now. In winter, night falls quick and hard in the desert.
The thing scrabbled backward, turned tail, and ran.
I leapt for my car. Fast as I am, I can’t follow a bonedog on foot. With a V8 under me, though, I can track it as far as possible.
If the bezoar was reacting, I could track it even farther. That masked son of a bitch might have survived, but he wouldn’t survive what I was about to do to him. I could find out who he was really working for as a bonus.
But I thought I knew. And the knowledge chilled me all the way down to the bone.
You’ve gone too fucking far this time, you son of a bitch.
I piled into the car. She roused with a purr, and her tires smoked as I spun the wheel. I let off the brake and peeled out. There was an oof from the backseat, but I couldn’t do more than glance in the rearview and get a jumble of shadowy impressions, a flash of pale-copper flesh and the chain jingling. A merry, Christmas-like sound, but if you knew the real story behind Santa Claus you’d probably never want to hear sleigh bells again.
Hellbreed aren’t the only things that like tender little children. And don’t even get me started on the Tooth Fairy.
The bonedog was just visible down the street, nipping smartly around to the right. I gunned the engine and the Pontiac leapt for it, happy to be going fast again. The knocking in the upper registers of the engine’s roar was even more pronounced, I was really going to have to nail that down—
I checked the rearview again. Shadows ran like ink on wet paper. Little spots of red in the distance, loping along two by two.
More bonedogs.
The accelerator was already jammed against the floor.
Now it was a race.
25
A long, looping trail of rubber came to an abrupt stop. Something had blown in the engine. It didn’t matter—I bailed out, not caring that Belisa had rolled forward and was now half on the floor in the back.
She could stay there. I’d settle her hash after I settled Perry’s, when this was done.
The gates were shaking like epileptic hands. They banged together, and Henderson Hill rose behind them.
But something was wrong. It should have been a starlit sky, the waxing moon already risen like a yellow-silver coin. Instead, the vault of heaven was black, the stars blotted out and an unnatural dark covering my city like an old, veined hand.
Oh, this isn’t going to be fun.
I timed it just right, plunged between the gates. The Hill closed around me, I didn’t have time to slow down and see if it was going to try to make things tricky. Besides, something else was wrong—the bath of ice-cold prickles was much weaker than it should have been. I should have been hopping one step ahead of Henderson Hill’s voices, sparking off the thick sludge of etheric bruising.
Instead, the ghosts rushed at me in rotting cheesecloth veils. Their mouths were open in distorted screams. They poured through and past as if I was an empty door, splashing against the threshold where the bonedogs pulled up short, snarling.
The bezoar went nuts inside my pocket, straining against the silver cage and the leather. Buzzing like an angry bumblebee. A really big one.
One of the bonedogs put a paw over the threshold and snatched it back with a Helletöng-laden squeal, like metal rubbing against itself in an empty, echoing stadium. The Hill’s ghosts trembled on the edge of visibility, twisting together in boneless contortions to make a weird flowing screen.
A long black smear was the remains of the bonedog I’d chased in here. It bubbled, the eyes rolling free like weird crystalline fruits, the nerve roots decaying strings of quartz.
Now that’s weird. Back here again, just like a bad dream. And why does it feel so strange, Jill? Oh, this is great. Just fucking great.
I didn’t stop to ask myself why the Hill’s ghosts would be holding the bonedogs back. I just dug in my pocket for the bezoar while lengthening my stride, and bolted for the lowering bulk of Henderson Hill.
The sky was still featurelessly black. I kicked in a boarded-up door, the bezoar rattling and straining when I shoved it back in my pocket. I found myself staring at a hall with a slight upward slope. This was the building on the north side of the quad, a huge brooding monstrosity. It vibrated with agony and fear, but something was muting the force of the Hill’s terrible cold unlife.
The doors marching down the hall jerked and shuddered. Normally they’d be opening and closing hungrily, and the entire hall would stretch to infinity, a trick of light and shade. There was a long smear on the floor, some dark weeping fluid, and I hopped over it. Making a lot of noise. They have to know I’m coming.
That’s okay, an iron voice inside me replied. Get Saul, kick their asses, and close up whatever door they’re opening to Hell. One two three, easy as can be.
I should have checked the entire Hill for a secondary evocation site. Either that or they’d come back, since this was too good a snack to resist for whoever they were bringing through. But goddammit, physical ’breed didn’t come up here!
Unless the reward—or the threat by their master on the other side of the walls separating worlds—was greater than the cost.
Up the hall, avoiding the heavy doors as they sluggishly swung wide to catch at the unwary, the bezoar straining against the leather of my coat and sending up a thin keening sound. I smelled smoke, the Talisman rumbling against my chest, and when I reached the top of the slope an
d the circular hall around the huge operating theater opened up, I was prepared for the crosscurrent, a psychic torrent raging around the still, horrible eye of where a great many of the old Hill’s worst excesses had gone down.
I was so braced for it, as a matter of fact, that I almost fell over when it didn’t show up. I actually stopped for a moment, braced in the threshold.
The hall should have been alive with screaming faces, weird noises, and a strong current of not-quite air pushing against every surface. Instead, it was a dingy, institutional hallway, curving out of sight on either end. My breath still puffed out in a freezing cloud, and my hair still stirred on a not-quite breeze.
But the roaring weirdness was gone.
Shit, shit shit—I hooked around the corner, running for the secondary door to the operating theater.
The one they used to wheel the bodies out through.
There were windows, long narrow strips of chicken-wire-laced glass up too high for anyone to peer through them. Maybe they were psychological. They ran with diseased blue light, the corners dripping fat little blobs of it to sizzle against the chipped layers of yellow paint. The scar sent a jolt of agonizing pain up my arm, but my hand didn’t waver, freighted with the gun. My boot soles pounded on the water-damaged linoleum. Each step seemed to take a lifetime, but I knew I was moving much faster than an ordinary human—or even an ordinary hunter.
I skidded, turning, and hit the secondary door with megaton force. The Talisman’s thrumming went up a full octave, and my aura began to sparkle with little sea-urchin specks of light. The door exploded, steel flying as shrapnel—
—and I was through, rolling, coming up with both guns and taking in the lay of the land.
The operating theater was concave, with two or three concrete terraces that used to hold audiences back in the days of electroshock and experimentation. The space at the bottom of the bowl was wide enough for two iron cages, one of them twisted and battered a bit, and an altar. The fluorescent glare of the lights blinked and buzzed, and the entire place was just full of robed, cowled hellbreed.
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