I shot the first one and didn’t have time to check the cages. Because between them, right where the central operating table would have sat, was an evocation altar—a pulsing blot of blackness and corruption. And atop it was a pale spinning oval of light.
It was an egg, and if they kept feeding it etheric force it would crack, and when it did the walls between here and elsewhere would gap just a little, and something would slip through.
Something old and hungry that Jack Karma had sent back to Hell during a firestorm in Dresden, decades ago.
The ’breed exploded into motion. I’d already put down two of them, one with a head shot and another with a glancing blow. Now all I had to do was stay one step ahead of them, and not shoot whoever was in the cages.
One of the hellbreed screamed, Helletöng like metal and glass buildings rubbing each other during an earthquake, and the curse hit me squarely. Right in the gut. The world turned over, I flew up toward the ceiling, but that was okay—twisting in midair, shaking the remains of the ’breed’s curse like so much water from a duck’s back, still firing. The fragments of hellbreed nastiness flew free, flapping their leathery wings, so many pieces of shadow careening through space. Momentum bled, etheric force crystallizing around me, and I hit the ceiling a glancing blow. Old warped glass fixtures shattered.
Falling, then. I was going to hit hard, braced myself, still firing. By the time I crunched into one of the concrete terraces with a terrible snapping sound, I had my whip free. It slithered, hit the floor, and my ribs ran with agonizing pain. The scar burned, burrowing into my flesh like acid, and the ’breed leapt for me, hanging in the air with his robe and cowl fluttering, arms up, claws extended, and his legs drawn up like a spider flicked into a candle flame.
Split-second reflex was all I had. The whip’s end was airborne, my side giving a hot flare of spiked agony as muscles pulled against broken ribs. I caught him as he was already heading down from the apex of his leap, the other ’breed hanging back for some reason, and that was bad news.
He was slight and dark, with a handsome bladed face the flechettes tore across with a smart crackling jingle. Skipping aside, reaching the next terraced step up and my legs bending and tensing, flung up with a leap that was half instinct and half desperation. If they were avoiding me, waiting for this guy to finish me off, he was probably a Big Cheese. I had never seen him before, which meant he wasn’t local.
Which, ten to one, told me I was looking at Perry’s boss, the one trying to bring Argoth through. He did look kind of like a handsomer Buster Keaton, right down to the pouting lips.
And since Perry could produce hellfire in the blue spectrum, his boss was likely to be more badass than one tired hunter could handle.
For a brief moment I thought of unleashing the Talisman. But with the spinning egg over the evocation altar hungrily grabbing at all the power it could find, that was a monumentally bad idea.
Dammit.
Julius howled, and the windows shattered, blown outward. I gained my footing on the uppermost tier of concrete, a few busted wooden seats to my left and clear running room to my right. Shook the whip free as my ribs fused together with heavy red pain, the scar like hot lead whittling deeper and deeper as I aimed. One shot, God, come on, one shot, give me a good shot here—
I pointed and squeezed, praying.
I hit him. I knew I hit him, too—his sleek head snapped back and black ichor flew.
But then his chin came down, the hurt sealing itself over and the hard carapace of a hellbreed flowing like so much molten sugar, and he hissed at me, baring his pearly, shark-sharp teeth.
I heard a high nasty giggle from one of the watching ’breed, and braced myself. This was going to hurt, and I was down to four shots left in the extended clip.
Goddammit.
The lights—and who the hell changed the bulbs in here, anyway?—flickered. Glass rained down, and the bits of curse flapped in lethargic circles. The scar gave an agonizing wet crunch of pain, and I hissed in a breath, broken ribs twitching with pain. Every hellbreed in the operating room crouched except Julius, whose blue eyes widened—
—before more glass shattered. Perry resolved out of thin air and knocked him on his ass. The screen of bland normality over Perry had dropped, and for a heartbeat or two I saw underneath—the thing that inhabited his shell snarled and crouched before leaping down toward the altar, on a trajectory that would take him right to where Julius was landing.
Go figure. I was actually not unhappy to see him. Despite the fact that he was playing me and his boss off against each other for some reason.
My fingers moved mechanically, tucking the whip and reloading. I was almost able to aim again before one of the other ’breed decided to take care of what the boss couldn’t, and as I threw myself away toward the wooden chair, I saw the mask fluttering over the lower half of his wax-white face and knew who I was facing.
Oh yeah. This just keeps getting better.
26
Rule number two of fighting ’breed: keep moving. Even if your ribs are broken and your entire body feels like it’s been passed through a meat grinder, don’t slow down. Slowing down means dying.
What little I could see of the masked ’breed’s face was a ruin of scar tissue. Guess Belisa hadn’t put him down for good, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. I bounced like a jackrabbit, whip uncurling, knew he’d dodge, and swung back, my leg flashing out to kick a lean dark cowled ’breed in the face. The shock jolted all the way through me, but it did knock the son of a bitch away and into a snarling mass of ’breed vying to take Perry’s guts out the hard way. Including Julius, but Perry seemed to be doing all right and I had all I could handle in front of me.
I landed on the twisted cage to the right and snapped a glance down. It took a moment for it to register, because I immediately had to hop aside, my whip flying out again and my gun speaking with a sharp crackling roar. The recoil grated in my shoulder. The scar writhed on my wrist like a live thing. I landed on the other cage, and the roaring of the thrashing hellbreed kicked up a notch. They hit the altar squarely, and the pale egg of etheric force began to spin.
That’s not good. So not good. But I couldn’t worry about that, because the masked ’breed was stalking me again, and this time I was sure he wasn’t a copy. He was just too goddamn fast, and he had his little tabi booties on, the bastard.
And to top it all off, the cages were empty.
What the hell? But I had no time, because Perry was thrown back like a meteorite, a streak of black ichor and the incandescence of pure unholy rage trailing him. He hit the concrete so hard he dented it, and the crack was loud enough to drown out everything else.
Julius snarled and leapt on him, I shot the masked ’breed twice, and began to think of how I could get out of here while Perry was still ass-deep in angry ’breed. If Saul and Gilberto weren’t here—but there was that pale egg of light needing to be dealt with, and the evocation altar too. Good luck calling up banefire while dealing with the Great Masked Ninja in Pajamas.
There was only one thing to do.
This is going to hurt.
Tensing, stupid body bracing itself for a hit it knew was coming, I leapt from the top of the cage, my boots skidding on the slick iron. Falling, right for the pale egg. The silver I carried, not to mention my hard thick exorcist-trained aura, would disrupt it. I’d be thrown like popcorn, again. I’d been doing a lot of that lately.
I might also lose an arm or a leg. Or more. Details, details. But I’d slam the door closed on the toes of the ’breed trying to come through, and that was worth the risk.
It’s always worth the risk.
I hung in the air for a long crystalline second. The body was still flinching, like that was going to change the outcome. The rest of me kept firing, the masked ’breed having realized what I was going to do and spitting a stream of curses like rancid lasers at me. They were too slow. I was going to make it.
But the world paused, the way it w
ill do when something truly significant happens. There, in the door I’d kicked in, a pair of familiar figures: one male, one female. The female had a vacant smile, her black eyes wide and hungry as collapsed neutron stars. The collar around her slim neck had rubbed through her skin, biting into her shoulders as well, and blood slid down her tattered blue silk. The Chaldean wasn’t healing her fast enough.
The other was the caretaker, his filmed eyes wide and the clarity around him brighter than the fluorescents. He reached up, slowly, and his clever thin fingers touched the locking pin holding the chain to the collar. Hellbreed hung in the air, their motion arrested, and I saw—No, I thought I saw…
No, I saw. I saw the light shining through the caretaker’s façade of mute blind scarring, his hair turning a feathery gold—and the things behind him, reaching up in spires of snowy white, what were they? Wings, but not of any terrestrial bird. Glowing, in a way that seemed oddly tip-of-the-tongue familiar.
My blue eye burned, a twinge of acid fire spearing back into my brain. I could not look away from the light, dear God, the light pouring through him like dawn breaking, a dawn that was not tired or old…
What the hell?
The pin holding the chain to the collar clicked free. The chain slithered, clashing all the way down, but the collar stayed put. Melisande Belisa inhaled sharply, and hurtful intelligence came back into her black eyes. She looked across the confused jumble of ’breed doing their best to kill each other, and I swear to God I saw an awful sanity in her gaze.
The caretaker’s lips were moving. He whispered in her ear, his eyes unfilmed for a long terrible moment, piercing blue casting shadows against her face. The shadows of Chaldean moving over her aura flinched back from that blue glow.
The chain finished hitting the floor with a slither, and she was already moving. Time made a snapping sound, like a huge rubber band breaking, and the noise of an almighty huge fight broke over me like a wave. My hair blew back on a breeze from nowhere, my coat flapped, and something out of the ordinary had indeed happened.
Because instead of falling into the oval of light and cutting off the door between here and Hell, I landed with bonecracking force in front of the altar, a short howl escaping my abused lips. And the masked ’breed was on me in a heartbeat. I shot him twice, but he was too close.
Now it was time for knife work.
He tried to grab my head and slam it into the altar’s base. I wriggled away, and he’d taken so much damage he was moving slowly, at least for him. I jerked my leg up, the bony part of my knee sinking into what passed for his groin and meeting something weirdly squishy. That was only a distraction, though, because my largest knife had sunk in to the hilt, only the crossguard stopping it from vanishing into his belly. I wrenched it back and forth, the reek of hellbreed guts spilling free assaulting me. Hot noisome fluids bathed my hand.
The noise was incredible. Now I knew what happened when a Sorrow went up against a ’breed. It wasn’t pretty. But between her and Perry, Julius might have a lot of trouble, and if I could just get up—
The assassin slumped atop me, corruption racing through his tissues. His fingers flexed, and I half-swallowed a scream. His claws grated between my ribs, and I was losing yet more blood. The scarring on his coppery face cracked apart, fine noxious dust bleeding out.
That meant he was dying. Thank God. I’d worry about the next ’breed to step up and start committing assassinations when I survived this.
If I survived this.
Get up, Jill.
But there was a problem with that. My body would not obey me. I blinked warm wetness out of my eyes, every muscle tensing and the scar a cicatrice of fierce heat on my wrist. There was a horrible draining sensation, worse than any blood loss I’d ever felt. A warm lassitude spread up my ankles.
I stared up at the pale egg. It was spinning now, filaments of it reaching out and snagging the flying bits of curse as they got too close. Each little bat-flapping thing went into the hungry maw. That was where most of the nasty psychic force of the Hill had gone, too. A nice snack for whoever was waiting under Hell’s dry screaming skies, probably impatiently tapping a clawed and twisted foot.
He would have to step through to claim that snack, though.
And he can’t do that if you get up and stop him. So DO it!
Swearing at myself didn’t work. But my body twitched. Something hit the floor next to me—a hellbreed claw, ripped free of its owner’s body and smoking with corruption. It twisted and flexed, wet, rancid dust pouring out of it in veined streams.
Will and life roared back into me. There was an odd ringing in my ears. My body suddenly obeyed, jerking up off the floor. A split second later, something huge barreled for me and I leapt aside instinctively, knife in one hand and my whip flashing out. It hit the bleeding mass of Julius squarely, and his resultant roar was a wall of warm air pushing me back. My boots slipped in greasy crud—bits of hellbreed rained down, plopping obscenely and still twitching as they hit.
A blue blur streaked by. Belisa, her battered feet slapping the stone and her mouth a rictus of effort, leapt with fluid effortless authority onto Julius. She clawed at him, screaming in the heavy consonant-laden mess of Chaldean, the bruising of the parasite on her aura turned as dark and sonorous as mountain thunder. Perry, just as battered and wearing a mad death’s-head grin, was right behind her. They descended on the hapless ’breed, and I snapped a glance up.
The room that had been full of Hell’s citizens was now an abattoir. Rotting bits of ’breed were everywhere. My breath came in short, hard sobs; the scar went back to chuckling as it tasted the death and misery riding the air. It sent a jolt up my arm, and the terrible draining sensation swirled away.
Julius howled. Both of them were ripping at him, like a pair of wolves at a carcass. His head smashed against the altar, right where mine had been a few seconds ago. Bile burned the back of my throat, I retched silently and pointlessly. Belisa made a guttural noise, the chanting in Chaldean hitting a vicious peak and the collar flashing with deep gold, and she finally grabbed Julius’s head in her strong slender hands.
I was expecting a quick movement and the green-stick crack of a breaking neck. But no. Her flexible thumbs dug and gripped, and she popped his eyes like two overripe grapes. The ’breed’s spine arced up into a hoop, his heels drumming the concrete, and corruption raced through his tissues.
If I’d eaten lately, it would have come up in a tasteless rush. As it was, I retched again and stumbled back, slipping and sliding. The floor was awash.
Perry was suddenly there, resolving out of thin air with a sound like nasty laughter trailing him. “Enjoying the show, my dear?” His ribs heaved, but he didn’t sound at all out of breath. “What a pleasant little interlude. I’ve waited to do that for so long.”
“P-P-P—” My lips refused to shape his name. I wasn’t looking at him. I was looking past him, at the spinning egg. A hairline crack had appeared in its center, a thin line of darkness.
Melisande Belisa threw back her head and howled. It was an animal’s cry, except for the all-too-human rage tinting it.
The hairline crack widened. My right hand swept down, sheathed my largest knife, and was heading for my gun when Perry grabbed my wrist and squeezed, grinding the small bones together. “Oh, no you don’t. She’s expendable, my darling. I still have plans for—”
My left fist, braced with the whip handle, got him in the belly. It was a good solid punch, and that did make him lose all his air. My other fist crashed into his face and his head snapped back. I kicked him, too, and the Talisman made a rustling, roaring sound.
I hadn’t used it, had I? No, if I’d used it this whole place would be a crater and the door to Hell would be busted wide open. And yet…
Perry went down. He slid back along the floor, fetching up against concrete with another stunning sound.
And the pale, spinning oval over the altar…
Cracked.
27
Be
lisa howled, a guttural, abused scream. A hairline crack, darker than the pit of a black hole, zigzagged through the spinning egg of light. It widened, just a little, and something white showed.
The Sorrow rose. She cast a glance back over her shoulder, her face slack and terribly graven. Bruises crawled over her skin, the shadows of Chaldean sorcery doing what they could to ameliorate the damage. But she was in bad shape, bleeding all over, her tangled hair smoking at each knot.
Each inch of silver on me ran with blue flame. My head was full of screaming noise.
“Kill,” Perry hissed, from where I’d kicked him. “Kill it now!”
I lifted my gun slowly. It was a terrible dream, fighting through syrup, my muscles full of lead.
Belisa’s chin dipped wearily. She pitched forward just as the egg stopped spinning.
The thing that slid its malformed hand through the barrier between this world and Hell twitched. I heard myself screaming, sanity shuddering aside from the sight. They do not dress when they are at home, and when they come through and take on a semblance of flesh it’s enough to drive any ordinary person mad. Wet salt trickles slid down from my eyes, slid from my nose and ears.
They were not tears.
There was a rushing, the physical fabric of our world terribly assaulted, ripping and stretching. My screams, terrible enough to make the Hill shudder all the way down to its misery-soaked foundations. Perry, hissing in squealgroan Helletöng, and under it all, so quiet and so final, Mikhail’s voice from across a gulf of years. Long nights spent turning over everything about his death, remembering him, all folding aside and compressing into what he would say if he was here. Or maybe just the only defense my psyche had against the thing struggling to birth itself completely.
Now, Mikhail said. Kill now, milaya. Do not hesitate.
My teacher’s killer was in the way.
The scar crunched on my wrist. I squeezed the trigger. Both triggers, and I saw the booming trail of shock waves as the bullets cut air. Belisa’s fingers had turned to claws, Chaldean spiking the soup of noise, and she tore at the not-quite-substantial flesh of the thing. Blue light crawled over her as if she wore silver, the same blue that the caretaker’s eyes had flashed. The shadows of the Chaldean parasite flinched aside, for some incomprehensible reason.
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