Huntress

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

  “You have no idea about me,” she said. “You have no idea who or what I am.”

  “Not for lack of trying,” Jack reminded her.

  The door of the chapel popped open, and a small scavenger demon, a carrion eater of some kind, shoved its pointed head out, its large, lidless eyes rolling over Jack and Ava. “Yeah?” it squalled, a long tongue flicking over its chapped lips.

  “Be careful,” Ava told Jack. Her face, for the first time, was flat and her posture heavy.

  Jack looked down his nose at the scavenger. “Areshko. I need to see her.”

  “Yeah!” the demon shrieked, and hopped away on bird feet, its leathery wings fluttering like a curtain at the wrong time to show a multitude of piercings and an unfortunate PVC onesie.

  Here were zombies and the things that ate them. It wasn’t a city, Jack thought, it was an abattoir. For who, he wasn’t sure yet. Hopefully not him, or Ava. She wasn’t bad—devious, damaged, perhaps deranged, but she wasn’t one of the dark things slipping along the underside of the Black. Just a lost girl, like a hundred others he’d seen.

  Jack knew lost when he saw it. Until the Fiach Dubh had found him, he was as lost as Ava still appeared.

  She tugged at his jacket. “Tell Areshko who you are. Tell her that you have someone who wishes to be graced by her. Use those words.” Ava’s whisper sounded like a ghost.

  Jack rolled his eyes. “I’m not a virgin at bullshit, Ava.” He shoved the door wide open and stepped into the chapel. Rich honeyed light spilled from all directions, from hundreds upon thousands of candles set into every crevice and crack of the stone.

  Ava’s face, pale and narrow, watched him until the door rumbled shut.

  “Who comes?” The voice was cool as the light was sensual, a hint of a foreign land much, much farther than a channel away. It rolled over him, cool and sweet like rain.

  “It’s Jack Winter.” He coughed. “And I’ve brought someone who wants to be … er … graced by you.” Ceremonial words were as much a part of being a mage as the magic under his skin, but they always struck Jack as faintly antique and ridiculous. He felt awkward in a way he never did just sitting still with the magic.

  Areshko sat forward from her seat in the front of the chapel, near the altar. It was a Victorian high-backed chair, the red velvet worn away to the pink of skin, the wood carved with flowers and fancies of nymphs.

  The chair wasn’t that striking. The demon woman seated in it was. She had skin pale as a corpse, but covered in blue—blue tattoos that swirled over every inch, eyelids, lips, tongue, the tops of her thin breasts that pushed against a corset made from the ribcage of some poor creature that hadn’t been quick enough to avoid having its flesh picked clean.

  “Come closer,” the demon said. Jack started forward, wishing he had Gavin, Rich, and Dix arrayed in that loose triangle formation that had served him well when he’d lived on the street and had to fight something larger and nastier than himself.

  “Just yourself, though. The one who wishes grace will not show her face?” The demon’s flat nostrils flared.

  Jack bowed his head. “I’m sorry … er … lady. She thought it would be better if we didn’t disturb you.”

  The carrion demon peeked out from behind the throne and squawked at them in its own language. “Piss off, then,” Jack said, “if I upset you so.”

  Areshko’s teeth snapped together. “Mind yourself.”

  “I apologize if I’ve offended you.” Jack didn’t mean a word of it, but he was pragmatic, when the thing across from you could rip out your larynx and pick her teeth with it. “I’ll go.”

  The demon pointed at him. “I know you, Winter man.” Her voice dropped to a purr. “They call you the crow-mage. You are the one who sees the dead and the dark.”

  “Right,” Jack murmured, keeping his gaze on hers, like you did with angry dogs. She had pure-white eyes, as those who’d looked too closely at what they oughtn’t and come away perfectly blind had. Lawrence’s grandmother Winifred, in Jamaica, was blind, but she could smell a storm or a liar for miles. Jack sent her marzipans at Christmas every year.

  “Come, Jack Winter,” Areshko said. “I don’t bite, except in the right places.”

  Jack stepped closer, not within range of her finely wrought, bone-thin arms, but definitely within range of a hex. Trust in baby steps, if demons had such a concept. “So, my companion … she can come in? And let the gracing begin?”

  “Of course.” Her lips pulled back. Her teeth were blue. Jack saw with a start that the white marks weren’t skin—the white marks were the tattoos—burns, rather. The blue of the demon was everything else.

  Jack whistled against his teeth. “Ava, luv. The lady of the house says come along in.”

  Ava stepped through the door and bowed her head low. “My lady Areshko. I am honored.”

  “Come, child.” The demon extended her hand, curled her fingers, long nails clicking. “Do not stand on ceremony if you seek my grace so heartbrokenly.”

  Ava folded her hands and walked forward, head bowed, like a little girl taking first Communion. Jack had dated a Catholic girl the year after he had left Manchester, liked her enough to sit through a mass or three. The ceremony was comforting. Powerless, but comforting, and comfort counted more for ordinary people.

  “My lady Areshko,” she repeated, “I’ve come a very, very long way to receive your blessing. Might I approach?”

  “How do I know you are not an agent of the demon of Edinburgh?” Areshko tilted her head, flirting with a smile.

  Ava twitched. Her mask didn’t slip, but it wasn’t perfect. Jack eyed the door, calculated how long it would take one skinny, too-tall punk singer to run for it.

  “I’m not working for Nazaraphael,” Ava whispered.

  Areshko spat a curse when she heard the name. “That snake in a tree, that foul torturer. May the Triumvirate pick over his bones.”

  Jack held up his hands. “Easy. You know me, yeah? Jack. No one here has any love for that ponce in the suit. You have my word.” That, at least, was something he didn’t have to lie about.

  Areshko took a shuddering breath, and stilled. Her hair was wound in thick braids, at least ten, smoke-colored and wire-thick. “Very well. The word of the crow-mage. Words written in blood.”

  “Touch me?” Ava said plaintively. “Hold me in your embrace, Lady? Your touch brings wonder. I’ve heard it all the way across the ocean.”

  Before Jack could tell her that she was laying it on a little thick, at least to his taste, Ava dropped to her knees at Areshko’s feet. Jack saw her knife hand drop as she spread her arms. “Please.”

  The demon tensed, her long white nails curling against the wood. The chair creaked and Jack thought for a moment she was going to open Ava like a Christmas goose with the force of her gaze. Her long sweeping forehead and curious face, nearly alien with its planes and points, finally relaxed.

  “Of course, child,” she said at last. Her skirts rustled. They were paper, hundreds of vellum pages sewn together with the same thick thread Jack had seen at funeral homes.

  Jack allowed himself a smile thin as a razor blade. “Go ahead, Ava luv. This is what you’ve been waiting for.”

  Ava shot him a dirty look. “I accept your grace,” she told Areshko. “I accept the stillness of your blessing.”

  Areshko stretched out her hand, laid it on Ava’s forehead. A great shudder ran through Ava, one she played to the hilt, as though the feeling of Areshko was more than the last, longest climax she’d shared with Jack during the night in the hostel. Her hand dipped. It came up. The blade flicked free like a tongue of flame in the candlelight.

  “Now accept death, you bitch,” Ava hissed. She swung the knife, a smooth and economical movement that Jack recognized. He’d met blokes who could work a knife, gangsters. Russians mostly. Ava put them to shame.

  Areshko was still faster.

  She opened her mouth and Jack felt a great weight settle on him, a blinding, oppressi
ve echo inside his head, like he’d just stepped out of airlock doors into hard space.

  Ava shrieked as Areshko reached down, her mouth gaping impossibly wide. Jack saw white, bright. He saw leaping licks of flame, and he heard himself scream, the sound rip raw from his throat, as his sight locked on Areshko’s power.

  He saw it all—white cities, white fire. Great white wings made of metal and feather and flame. He knew that his brain was boiling in his skull and his eyes were bleeding, bursting, but he could not look away.

  The sight would not allow it.

  Areshko opened herself wider still, and then Ava was gone, just blinked out, like she’d never existed. The great sucking void subsided until Jack was on his knees, blood dribbling from his nose. He was crying blood tears. Everything ached, like he’d been battered by a wave of the Black itself.

  Ava’s scream snuffed out quickly as she vanished. Jack reached for the spot where she’d been, but there was just the heavy air of Catacomb City.

  Ava was gone. Jack blinked away the blood, as his eyes stung.

  Areshko stood from her throne, no longer a beautiful demon but a hateful thing pregnant with power. “Don’t weep for your companion, child. She could come back to you.”

  Jack shied away from her hand. “I don’t deal.”

  “I am not a demon who deals,” Areshko said. “Hell frowns on bargains that are not overseen.”

  “I know the Triumvirate’s law well enough,” Jack snapped. “I ought to. I’ve seen what it’s done to a score of mates—to a girl who wanted nothing more than fair play for what you took off her.” Ava was gone. The geas no longer sunk claws into him. It left a score of bleeding holes.

  “A human gives up a soul willingly,” said the demon. “What happened to old friends is not my concern.” She reached forward, quicker than a viper, and grabbed Jack by his neck, pulling him down and pressing her other hand over the center of his forehead, the spot where the sight looked outwards. “What concerns me is what I can give you, what you will do, to keep this transgression private.”

  For just a moment, everything stopped—the wash of the Black in his mind, the whispers of the spirits that clung to the catacombs, the restless stirring of magic that breathed from the air and the dead, and the demon herself.

  It was perfectly blank. Jack felt wet on his face, and realized he was crying real tears, silent and cold against the chilly underground air. Ava was gone and he was sane and the demon’s embrace was the sweetest thing he could ever imagine.

  “You see what I can do?” Areshko said. She released him and everything rushed back with a snap, like opening the window of your silent bedroom to morning traffic—the misery of the city, the ache of the sight, the small cold place that whispered Ava’s dead.

  “I can make your life very pleasant, crow-mage, and all you must do in return for my silence and my favor is stay. Stay here. Stay hidden.”

  Jack stumbled, feeling drunk, or as if he’d just taken a jackboot to the head. “How … How can you …” It had been so cool, so calm, so … empty. To not see was the greatest peace he could have imagined.

  “You have a talent, I have a talent,” Areshko said. “And if you spurn it, I will spread the news far and wide that you brought a viper into my house.”

  “I can’t stay here,” Jack whispered. “I don’t belong with the dead …”

  “Ah, and there is the dilemma,” Areshko whispered.

  “Die above, or live below? How to escape the trap? That is your talent, mage. Escaping traps. But not this trap, I fear.”

  Jack suddenly wanted Ava very, very badly. She and he could have done something, gotten away now that everything was wrong. But he was alone.

  Figure it out, Winter.

  “Do you accept my terms? Your continued presence for your sight?” Areshko’s blue tongue flicked out.

  Ava was devious, but Jack considered himself more of a talented liar. “You got yourself a bargain,” he said, taking a step toward the chapel door.

  Areshko smiled. It was terrifying, nearly slitting her face in half and revealing an extra row of teeth. “Then your secret is mine as my blessing is yours, Jack Winter.”

  She held out her hand. “Come here.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “That’s likely.” He stepped back again, and then spun and broke for the door, bones crunching under his boots. He clawed at the chapel door, bloodying his fingers. The fucking thing weighed a thousand pounds …

  “I am Areshko.” The demon inclined her head. “Now, what made you think that such a base deception would be effective?”

  Jack spread himself against the door, panting. “Hopes and dreams, mostly.”

  Areshko rose. He could hear her skirt moving. She moved in the space between them, until her fingers were on the back of his neck. When she touched him, everything around Jack went dead. He was alone, as a normal person would be, except for the hot breath of the demon on his neck.

  Her nails tore at his shirt. “Traitor.” Areskho lapped up the blood she’d drawn. “Deceiver.” Jack screamed as she lashed him with her nails again. “Liar.” Areshko shoved him against the door hard enough for Jack to see stars.

  “You thought you were clever,” Areshko said. “But you’re human, and I am demon. You stand no chance.”

  Areshko kept touching him, whispering to him, tasting his blood. Jack stopped screaming after a time, went still as the corpses around him, and waited for it to be over.

  When Jack came back to himself, he was looking up at a stone ceiling, in a snug, warm space, on something soft.

  He hurt. Like he’d hurt only a few times before, as when he’d met a skinhead with a pipe, alone. That had been two days in hospital and a few permanent markings. This felt worse. His shoulder was stitched, rudely, and his deeper cuts smeared with iodine, but the pain still coursed all through him.

  Jack coughed, his tongue thick and his lips cracked. “Anyone there? Anyone who doesn’t want to kill me?”

  The door swung open and the candles guttered. Jack sensed he wasn’t alone in the mausoleum—smelled it, really, a fresh and dense scent rather than desiccated and dry like everything else in the catacomb.

  He tried to pull something to him, magic or anything, but all that responded was a weak trickle of power.

  “Relax,” said a girl standing in the shadow of the door. Where Ava was robust, she was skinny, and where Ava was sultry, she was pale and thin as parchment. “I’m not here to hurt you,” she said.

  “Drawn by my good looks and charm?” Jack tried to smile, found it split his head in new and agonizing ways. “You aren’t the first, darling, and I doubt you’ll be the last.”

  She didn’t crack a smile, just set down a metal lockbox and popped it open, pulling out plasters and syringes and a bottle of antiseptic. She moved like she was used to it, her heroin-thin arms and hands moving like moths in the light. Glowing white skin showed through her cut-up shirt—something Jack himself would have worn ten years ago, when he was still shaving half of his head and putting fags out on his arm for kicks.

  “I know who you are, Jack, and I know why you came and what Areshko told me to do with you.” She slashed a thumb across her throat.

  “You’re me executioner?” Jack wished for a fag. “Guess I could be looking at worse things when I kick.”

  “I’m not under Areshko’s thumb,” the girl countered. “We have a business partnership.” She tapped a menthol out of her pack and stuck it between Jack’s lips, lit it with a cheap disposable lighter. Then she picked up one of her syringes. “Nicotine and painkillers,” she murmured, and then laughed to herself.

  Jack pulled his arm away and blew smoke out his nose. “I don’t fancy needles, luv.”

  “Don’t be a bloody baby,” she said, and jabbed him with it. A moment later Jack was under a warm morphine ocean, and everything seemed softer and far more pleasant.

  “So, you’re in bed with Areshko,” he murmured, trailing a hand lazily over the scratches that h
ad appeared everywhere, shallow wounds that felt like briars in his skin. “Is that literally and figuratively?”

  The girl didn’t flinch. Her eyes were burning from under her black fringe, accented by makeup that was both angrily and inexpertly applied. “It’s neither. She ordered me to murder you if you woke up.”

  “So?” Jack cocked his eyebrow. “Going to smother me, or euthanize me? You’ve got enough in those sharps for an OD.”

  “I’m not going to fucking kill you, Jack,” she snapped in irritation. “Subtlety’s not your strong suit, is it?”

  Jack exhaled. The smoke was ghost blue in the dense air. “I don’t make a habit of it, no.”

  The girl jutted out her chin like a small, defiant cat. “I’m no demon’s prozzie. I have a talent and I get paid for it, but I draw the line at assassination. I’m not some chav with a shank and a hard-on for blood.”

  “What’s your name?” Jack said. “You know mine. It’s an unfair exchange this side of the Black if I don’t have yours.”

  “Nina,” she said, “My name’s Nina, and I think it’s time that you and I got out of here, Jack Winter.” She finished his bandages, laid the rest of the fags by his bed, and slipped from his room like the shadow of a crow’s wing passing across the sun.

  Nina came back as more and more candlelight blossomed through the catacombs, patches and glades and gardens of gold amid the bony fingers of the broken tombs and the hollow eyes of the ossuary walls. Jack watched it from the small arrow-slit in the wall of his prison—the door was locked and no amount of fussing on his part could budge the ancient tumblers.

  Not that his hands were too steady—bloodied, ragged, and drugged as they were.

  “There’s a celebration tonight,” she said. “On account of you being Areshko’s new chew toy, I imagine.” She handed Jack a tray with a suspicious bowl of stew and a cup of water. Jack ate it anyway, his stomach pitching against the morphine.

  Nina sat on the edge of his bed. “Areshko has strong hexes on all of her boundaries, so making a run for it is out of the question. Got any bright ideas in that area? You’re supposed to be clever.”