Huntress

by Christine Warren, Marjorie Liu, Caitlin Kittredge, Jenna Maclaine

  “Thought that was why you bloody tricked me into this,” Jack said.

  “Yes, but we’re trying to make love, not war, if you can wrap your mind around that,” said Ava. “Until I’m ready, Areshko needs to think I’m one of hers.”

  “What am I, then?” Jack regretfully let go of the slip of Black that allowed his witchfire to burn, and the light went out. It got colder, and he shivered in his leather.

  “Look at that.” Ava smirked. “The bad nasty mage is afraid of the dark.”

  “Anyone with sense is afraid of the dark,” Jack told her. He felt for his lighter and found instead a leftover glow stick from a music festival in Brighton—frightful new-wave synth-pop, lots of girls in baggy pants and flannel; all around, a wasted weekend.

  Jack cracked the stick and alien green flared, making Ava blue-tinted where she walked beside him. His own flesh just went a little paler, ghost pale, and he could see all of his veins, the road map of the skin.

  “So here’s how we work it,” Ava said, loud enough to carry along the length of the tunnel. The pipes petered out, and it was brick now, the mortar hollowed out and rats skipping in and out of gaps in the stone. A Victorian sewer, with the smell to match. The fetid river trickling through the dip in the floor splashed on Jack’s boots and promptly soaked his socks.

  “Bloody hell. This Catacomb City better have plumbing, luv.”

  “Don’t worry,” Ava said. “Your delicate sensibilities won’t be tested for long.”

  “ ‘Delicate,’ hell. You can taste the air down here.” Jack’s feet squelched and echoed off the tunnel walls.

  “I’m going to tell Areshko I want to make a deal with her.” Ava slipped her arm through Jack’s. “For something or other—I think best on the fly. When she brings me in to her private chamber to seal the bargain, I’m going to kill her.”

  “Just another day as a demon hunter, yeah?” Jack muttered. “You can’t kill a demon, Ava.”

  “Don’t start with me,” she said. “I’ve done it. Believe it or not, Jack, not everyone lives in fear of hellfire. Some of us have learned to fight, and if you cared a little bit more about your fellow mages and a little bit less about yourself—”

  “You don’t finish that thought, if you know what’s good for you,” Jack snarled. His heartbeat overshadowed the sound of their steps. “You know nothing about me, Ava. Bloody skint.”

  “And you don’t know me, either,” Ava said. “Demons don’t come out on top with me, Jack.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Jack muttered.

  Ava’s heart was pounding, those extraordinarily statuesque breasts rising and falling fast.

  “You were trained by the crow monks,” she said. “I saw the ink and I know what it means. I was trained by a hunter who knew his shit. You should try a little trust with me, Jack.”

  “Not a vice I make a habit of, trust,” Jack said. “I find it allows treacherous little bitches with sad eyes entirely too close.”

  Ava rolled her eyes. “I like you, Winter, but this is getting …”

  Something tickled across the back of Jack’s neck before he could snap back, cold and sharp like a scale, or a fingernail. He hushed Ava. “We’re not alone.”

  Ava stiffened, and they both looked down the black mouth of the sewer tunnel. “Kill the light,” she said.

  Jack shoved the glow stick into his pocket. He tried to burn a hole in the darkness, see through it, but it was only a weak white glow from up ahead.

  “Shit,” Ava hissed, so quiet as to be just another breath. Jack heard a rustle as she crossed herself, a quick economical motion like cocking a shotgun. His own heart thumped against his bones.

  The white glow grew, bobbing through the dense air of the tunnel, and the figure within it floated into view. A woman, or really a girl, her long nightgown stained with blood, black tears coursing down her cheeks, her arms, covered in cuts, outstretched in supplication.

  The terrifying thing wasn’t the spirit. It was the fact that Ava saw her, too.

  “What is it?” Ava asked. Her breath made a puff of cold as the temperature dropped around them. Frost grew on the bricks, feathers and fingers reaching out for Jack’s cheek.

  “It’s a ghost,” Ava whispered to herself. “I’ve never seen a ghost—”

  “Ghosts don’t bring the cold with them,” Jack said. “That isn’t a ghost.”

  The girl locked eyes with him. They were black, like a spirit’s, but white flame danced in their depths.

  She opened her mouth and let out a moan, and then, she was against Jack, her hands at his throat, freezing, burning with cold.

  Jack slipped in the water and found himself flat for the second time that day, the thing howling and scratching at him. He felt it latch on to his magic, the part of him that lived, bright and burning, in his chest.

  Sorcerers could leech your magic and Fae could drink it like nectar, but nothing could yank it from him like this, this pain that made him scream and snap his teeth together as a convulsion gripped him.

  The girl’s hand was in his chest, in his heart. Jack forced his eyes open and looked into her howling face. Only one thing could turn the air cold and drink down human energy.

  “Ava …” Jack gasped. “Ava, help me …”

  Ava, her face a flat sheet of white, yanked a knife from her sweater pocket and flipped the blade open. “Get out of the way!” she shouted.

  Jack struggled against the creature, feeling ice-chip nails digging into him, his blood freezing as it came in contact with the air.

  “Move!” Ava shrieked, and Jack clawed at the thing, his fingers passing through the girl’s face, her shrieking mouth. “I’m bloody trying!”

  Ava gritted her teeth, and flipped the knife in her palm to hold it blade first. She cocked it back and threw it. The blade passed through the howling, screeching girl and she wavered, trailing off like blood in water. Jack felt a sharp, short tug in his shoulder, and then pain, as hot as crematory fire, chased away the cold. The knife was in his flesh, and the ghost was shrieking and thrashing, pinned by the iron surely as a butterfly on a tray.

  Jack reached into the Black and locked his hand around the ghost’s neck in turn. Blue fire blossomed. “That’s the end for you, luv,” he said, and pushed the girl off him. She was hungry, but Jack was desperate and bloodied, and his raw piece of magic blasted her off him and dissolved her into a thousand black strands of smoke.

  Ava leaned down and pressed a hand over the wound. “Hold still. This will hurt.” She yanked the blade free without any warning, and Jack let out a yelp several octaves higher than he would have liked. Ava shook her head as she helped him up. “What the fuck,” she said, “was that?”

  Jack accepted the silk handkerchief she handed him and pressed it over the knife wound, below his collar bone, but it still spread a dull, sick ache all through him, and his vision blurred. “A revenant,” he said. “A citizen of the City of the Dead. Bansidhe, black dogs, those sorts of things. Hungry dead things, looking for their next meal.”

  “Is that … normal?” Ava picked up the blade from the ground, wiped it carefully on her arm, and folded it back in on itself.

  “Iron destroys revenants.” Jack felt the bloody scratches on his neck. “Much as it buggers me to say it, you saved my life.”

  Ava shrugged. “Of course I did. I need you, Jack. And I like you, a little.”

  Jack popped the kinks out of his back from where he’d hit the brick. His shoulder was bleeding slowly, a steady leak that would do him serious harm if he didn’t get it stopped. He wadded the silk up tighter, shoving it under his shirt, hissing as the pressure sent fresh fingers of pain up and down his arm. “I suppose I can stand the sight of you, as well.”

  “Touching. Let’s keep moving,” Ava said. “The city is much safer than these tunnels.”

  “You’re wrong,” Jack said quietly, after they’d been walking for a time. “Revenants don’t just appear. Someone has to let them out of the City.”<
br />
  “So?” Ava said. “Obviously, Nazaraphael has a problem with you being down here, with me.”

  “So, demons don’t need revenants to do their work,” he said. “Nazaraphael has Barney, and a hundred others he could have sent if he really wanted us out.”

  “We’re not the only humans down here,” Ava said. “Some kid must have been messing with necromancy.”

  “Undoubtedly,” Jack said. His voice dripped ice, just as the revenant had.

  “You can rot in Hell, Jack,” she said. “I’m not a liar.”

  “Oh, you are,” Jack told her. “We all are, luv. What matters is the reason for the lie, the core of truth. Feel like telling me that much yet?”

  Ava sighed. The sewer diverged in two, and she ducked down into a tunnel that was old enough to be of rough stone instead of brick, the floor packed earth. “We’re close,” she said. “I promise, Jack, this isn’t malice. I picked you out of practicality.”

  “For both our sakes, darling, I hope you were telling me the truth just then.”

  “Me too,” Ava murmured, slipping ahead into the dark.

  The tunnels got so low that Jack banged his head unless he bent at the waist. He cursed when he left hair and blood behind. “I’m going to need a new head, we keep this up.”

  “Might improve things,” Ava teased.

  “Up yours,” Jack muttered, but the mood had softened as they wound deeper into the ground. Jack could be patient. He could wait until Ava slipped, and then he, in turn, would slip the geas and perhaps show her what he was about sans sex magic, when Ava wasn’t in control. He had a sneaking suspicion she’d enjoy herself. Crow knew it was better fun than skulking in manky tunnels.

  His scratches still hurt, small fingers of flame on his neck and shoulders. The skin would go black in the next few days, the contact with something from the City of the Dead spreading small deaths of its own.

  A set of stairs appeared, narrow and slick with moisture. “These aren’t any sewers,” Jack said.

  “No,” Ava agreed. “These are the Catacombs. Not the tourist trap, but the real thing, lost to the city but not to the Black. Most people … humans, that is … don’t even know they exist.”

  “And how, exactly, is it that you know?” Jack said.

  Ava sniffed. “In my training, we do plenty of research. There are plague pits down here,” she said. “When the Black Death was dancing on bones, they walled up hundreds down here. Sealed them up alive.”

  “Cheery.” Jack rubbed the back of his neck, his vision prickling like a thorny collar.

  “Don’t worry,” Ava said. “I won’t let the boogeyman get you.” She patted the pocket of her sweater, where the knife lived.

  “How does someone like you get into something like this?” Jack asked. The stairs were dizzying, never-ending, like an illusion.

  “You mean someone like a nice human girl?” Ava laughed lightly.

  “You’re the last person I’d describe as ‘nice,’ luv, if I used that word to describe someone at all.” Jack’s foot skidded on the slime underfoot and he caught his hand against the wall, leaving a wide streak of blood.

  “After my family put me out for turning in that guy who came after me—for all the good it did—I was in a bad way. Daniel found me. He was a good man. He taught me how to use this abomination inside me for a purpose. I became an exorcist, like him. I kill demons now.”

  “File that under touching stories guaranteed to make a tear well up,” Jack said.

  Ava snapped her gaze on him, like dog teeth. “You think I’m making this up? Would you rather I went around seducing men and stealing their life force, like a sorceress would use her sex magic?”

  “What about me?” Jack said.

  Ava tossed her head. “This is a war. You’re not a civilian. You don’t count.”

  “Just what a bloke wants to hear from the bird he’s shagging.” Jack kept silent as the air got thicker and the darkness heavier outside their small circle of green light.

  The stairs wound around and around, in spirals that grew tighter and tighter, and then suddenly they ended and Jack was free, standing in the open air before a massive wooden door spiked with iron nails.

  “It’s a church,” he blurted out. The Gothic wheel of window above the door was half-crushed under the rubble that had grown over it like the roots of a tree, but the shape was unmistakable.

  “It was,” Ava corrected him. “Now it’s the gateway into Catacomb City.”

  Jack gave the church door a raised eyebrow, feeling like perhaps he should stand up straight, or worry about his immortal soul.

  Ava lifted her hand to the door and placed her palm on it. After a moment, she shook her head. “You do it.”

  Jack felt a warding hex curl around his hand when he stepped in and touched the door. It wasn’t strong, it didn’t have teeth, but it felt like the bands of an open trap—one wrong move and the whole mess would snap shut and take off his fingers.

  Who goes?

  Jack swallowed. “Jack Winter.”

  Ava gave him a dirty look. He sighed. “And a friend.” If they decided they didn’t like the look of him, the hex would kill him before he even had time to tell Ava this was all her fault.

  There was a painful moment of consideration on behalf of whoever held the hex. You mean us harm.

  “Not me, mate. Just out for a walk, really.”

  Something that could have been laughter tickled his mind. Then be well, and enter, brother of the crow. The hex curled back, like lace in a flame.

  Jack pushed on the door, and it groaned its way open. The hex kissed his skin, a memory of heat as Jack crossed the barrier, and then he looked ahead and stopped, his boots crunching on old masonry and older bones.

  They stood in a great sweeping space, roofed like a medieval cathedral. Curling stone beams made up the structure’s bones. The arch rose high enough to disappear into the shadows. Along the walls, hollows showed coffins, descending to shrouds, descending to stone sarcophagi carved with illuminations of saints and devils. Ossuaries at the lowest level were packed with skulls.

  Catacomb City stretched vastly, lights flickering along upper levels, and ladders and stairs curving at angles that made Jack’s neck cramp. The floor was a course of culverts from a Roman sewer system, dotted with mausoleums and dark shapes slinking in and out of light, like a life-size and utterly peculiar rat maze.

  “Welcome to Areshko’s pride and joy,” Ava said. “Impressive, isn’t it?”

  “Horrifying would be more apt,” Jack said. “But for the sake of keeping all me limbs attached, we’ll use your phrase. How did she build this place without Nazaraphael’s notice?”

  “The dead are a powerful ward against prying eyes,” said Ava. “You of all people should know that.” She rubbed her arms in the draft as they looked out from their ledge. “I always wonder what it was like before the demons came.”

  “I expect when humans trod it it was a graveyard, and then the dirt underneath a graveyard, and then nothing at all,” Jack said. “That much, I do know. Demons fill up the spaces that people can’t or won’t see. They crawl into gaps left by fear and desire and make themselves at home.”

  “We should pay respects to Areshko,” Ava said. “Before she gets suspicious.”

  “Yes, yes, by all means.” Jack flipped a hand. “Lead the way, Jeeves. And once we’ve doffed our top hats to the demon lady, fetch us a spot of Earl Grey.”

  “Your posh accent is atrocious,” Ava told him. “Stick to what you are, Manc.”

  Jack’s mouth quirked. “Most Yanks can’t be bothered to tell the difference.”

  Ava leaned up and kissed his cheek, feather-light and quick. “I’m not most.”

  They descended to the level of the floor, winding among the mausoleums. Jack frowned. “People down here seem awfully dead.”

  “We’re in a giant tomb,” Ava said. “You’re surprised?”

  “No …” Jack whipped his head around as so
mething moaned from behind the closest stone wall. “I mean ‘dead’ quite literally.” He watched a hunched figure still wearing a few scraps of hair and skin scuttle from one shadow to the next. “I hate to tell you, Ava, but you’ve got a zombie problem.”

  She snorted. “Not everyone sees things the way you do, Jack. Areshko uses them for cheap muscle and labor.”

  Jack rubbed his nose. “Smell a bit. Could be right nasty if they think you’re threatening their mistress.”

  “Zombies are easy,” Ava said. “Stab them in the head or light them on fire. One of the first things Daniel taught me.”

  “How nice for you,” Jack said. “I wish I had my own personal Mister Fucking Miyagi.”

  “Jealous?” Ava’s hand skimmed across his arse and gave a light slap.

  “Just hoping that when you have Areshko’s angry zombie armada on your tail, you’re as confident,” said Jack.

  “Do your part and there won’t be any drama like that. Fuck around and I’ll make sure I leave you to be a chew toy.”

  Jack sighed. If she wasn’t so bloody attractive, he would have thrown in his lot by now, geas or no. Zombies put a lid on any bloke’s libido.

  The light grew stronger and the dark spots fewer, as they came to a much older ruin—a pagan place, Jack guessed, something that had sat on the land long before there was an England or a Scotland behind Hadrian’s Wall. Candle flames filled the glassless windows, and the tiny graveyard next to the chapel showed its teeth, the stones worn down to nubs amid mummified nettles and vines.

  “This is where she holds court,” said Ava. “I’m a human. I’m not allowed inside.”

  “You’re about as human as I am,” Jack muttered, raising his hand to bang on the scarred oak door.

  Ava’s face twisted in surprise, like he’d slapped her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that you can either accept you have a talent for sorcery, or pretend you’re not touched by the Black, like that Daniel wanker seems to have trained you to,” Jack said. “Trust me, Ava, the first way is easier.”