To Hell and Back dv-5

by Lilith Saintcrow

  "You do not serve my plans. You are what I engage in planning to keep safe. Look at me."

  "No." Other people might have a witty saying or a pretty epitaph. Not me. I will have only sheer, stubborn refusal. He was still forcing me, still demanding.

  "Look at me." The softest of his voices, the most careful. The most human. "Dante. Please."

  My eyes flew open.

  He leaned in close, lashes veiling the green burn of his gaze. His hair fell, thick choppy streaks of silvery contrasting sharply with wet blackness. Fine lines bracketed his mouth, fanned out from the corners of his eyes.

  After so long unchanging, he seemed to have aged. But demons don't age. Was it another mask?

  "What happened to you?" My traitorous heart pounded inside my chest.

  "I made a fresh bargain with the Prince." He overrode my sudden surging struggle. "Our salvation is so very close, do not doubt me now."

  "Eve-"

  "That is not her Name. She is Lucifer's Consort, not a human child. You fool. Did you open a door into Hell at her bidding? Do you have the least comprehension of what that means? A large portion of her allies, her precious resistance, escaped into the free air. Lucifer will make war upon them himself, he cannot afford to do otherwise — but she was my bait in a trap I laid with care, a trap you almost made unusable. I had tokill her gathering once you broke the walls between your world and Hell."

  How could I even begin to explain? "I was giving you time." I whispered. "And staying alive. It was the only way I could — " Do something, instead of waiting for you! I was going to finish, but he didn't let me.

  "McKinley was more than capable of hiding you."

  "Not from her he wasn't." She's mine, Japhrimel. The words trembled on my lips, the secret I had not opened my mouth to tell him directly. My own small private deceit in this snakepit of lies and clashing agendas. I couldn't tell him now. "I had to, Japh." I sagged against the wall, going limp in his hands, but my fingers were tight on Fudoshin's hilt. If he let go of me now -

  He sighed, a sharp dissatisfied sound. "It matters little now. We are on our way to a meeting with Lucifer. I will deliver the wayward Androgyne and —"

  I brought my knee up, sharply, he countered the movement, and we almost spilled to the floor. He regained his balance, fingers biting in cruelly. "Stop." Did he sound breathless? The scar turned to molten metal on my shoulder, another warm pulse of Power filling my nerves and veins.

  My skin crawled. I opened my mouth to scream at him, but he overrode me.

  "Once she is delivered to him, she has agreed to distract his attention. I will strike him down even as he gloats over her. Will you stop?"

  I went utterly still, a clockwork spinning inside my head pausing for just a moment. Don't trust him. Don't listen. Plot and counterplot, Danny.

  When I did speak, it was a low, gravelly whisper. "How can I trust anything you say to me?"

  "I have gone into Hell for you, not once but several times." He let go of me in a sudden convulsive movement. "That should be enough. Even for you."

  "You think I've been on a fucking holiday cruise? Where do you think I've gone?" My arm fell to my side, Fudoshin avoiding a stack of crates strapped to the floor.

  "As far as necessary. As I would for you." His hands dropped. His coat was just as black as ever, but that shock of silver-threaded hair… he was different. Too different.

  We had both changed out of all recognition. What was left?

  "Let me get this straight." I swallowed, my dry throat clicking. "You expect me to stand there and trust you while you hand Eve over to Lucifer — the very thing he's always wanted out of this game." He wanted me to tell him where she was, and when I wouldn't I was a Judas goat, meant to lure her in. He used me, you used me — what's the goddamn difference?

  His left hand came up. In it, satiny wood gleamed, and the sheathed Knife at my hip gave a slow sonorous ringing, like crystal stroked just right. The finials of its other half cradled Japh's hand, moving slightly, yearning out of his grip and toward me. His fingers trembled as he held it, as if he wanted to drop it.

  He took two slow steps forward as the hover's gyros stabilized, the bounce telling me we were ashore now. We'd just made landfall.

  Where the hell were we?

  Off the map, sunshine. You've just gone off the fucking edge of the world.

  Japhrimel offered me the Knife. "Take it."

  My heart thumped against my ribs. I eyed his hand, eyed the other half of the Knife. So he had retrieved it. Where had he hidden it in Hell?

  Would I ever have the time or the courage to ask him? He cupped the blade in his right hand and released the hilt, offering it like a goblet of wine to thirsty gods. If it hurt him, his face showed no sign. Time ticked by as the hover began to climb, the earpopping of altitude a heavy auditory weight.

  If you take that, Danny, you'll be able to kill him. He's fast and strong, but you saw what it did to Sephrimel. You'll have some power in this relationship. You'll have a little control.

  And if he pulls a mickey on you one more time, you can bury the thing in his guts.

  My tat shifted on my cheek, diamond pinpricks under skin. My emerald lit, a spark popping in the gloom. Japhrimel waited, half of the Knife trembling in his hands, aching to clasp its twin and be whole again.

  "It's yours." Very softly, his mouth its usual straight line after it had given the words to the air. Still, he didn't look at me, his eyes hidden behind that fringe of hair. A muscle in his cheek flickered. "It was made for a hedaira's hand."

  Go ahead, Danny. Take it. You've got to finish this game anyway. You dealt yourself in at Notra Dama. Time to pick another card.

  I didn't realize I'd moved until I closed my fingers over the hilt. It hummed in my hand, happily, and the memory of the sick gulping noise turned my stomach over hard.

  Japhrimel raised his eyes, shaking his hair back. He shook both his hands free, flicking his fingers. "Will you trust me?"

  Four little words. I weighed half the Knife in my hand, its mate vibrating against my hip like a slicboard rattling before it dumps you. I don't know if I should. I don't know if I want to. "I don't know if I can."

  His shoulders dropped. My stomach rattled and flipped, as if I was tumbling in freefall again. Roaring wind in my ears, prepared to leave all this struggling and striving behind. The look on his face was like being stabbed, and all the broken places inside my head gave a flare of devouring pain.

  Why was I such an idiot for him? Just when I thought I had no reason to trust him, he went and did something like this. Like giving me a weapon.

  My mouth opened. "But I can try."

  We stared at each other. The hover groaned and rocked as the angle of ascent sharpened. I stood there gripping half the Knife with white-knuckle fingers, my head suddenly full of the rushing noise of Paradisse wind sliding past as I prepared to splatter myself over the pavement below. I'd been so ready just to give up.

  Again.

  Japhrimel nodded, a short sharp movement. The silver in his hair glittered. "Thank you." Gravely, as if he hadn't just handed me the only weapon in the world that could possibly kill him.

  The scar flamed with soft heat, and his aura over mine settled, thin fine strands of gossamer energy binding together rips and tears, healing the rent tatters of my shielding with infinite care. Was he doing it consciously?

  Did it matter?

  I searched for something else to say, another question to keep him standing here and talking to me. "What happened to you? In Hell?"

  One shoulder lifted, dropped. Goddamn shrugging demons.

  "Nothing of any account." Dismissive.

  The sharp bite of frustration whipsawed through me, drained away. "Come on, Japh. Your hair."

  "It doesn't please you?" He tilted his head slightly, letting the dim orandflu light play over its shagginess. Goddammit. "That's not the point. I just wondered what happened." You're not going to tell me a damn thing, are you? Especia
lly not now. You just want me to trust you blindly. You want to control everything about this.

  But the weight of half the Knife in my hand said differently.

  "Tell me why you almost killed yourself fleeing me. ' His hands spread slightly, expressive. I glimpsed dark shadows across his palms — from the touch of the Knife? I wondered.

  The edges of his coat ruffled as the hover shifted, settling at a new altitude.

  You really want to know? "I…"How could I put it into words? Because he'd tried to force me. Because Eve was the last shred of Doreen left walking the earth, and I had to believe there was some humanity left in her — because if there wasn't, there was none left in me either. Because I could no longer pray, because the Devil had robbed me of myself, because Eve was sticking it to Lucifer where it hurt for any number of reasons, none of which I could explain without a half-hour, absolute silence on his part, and a whole lot of luck. Or maybe a demon-Merican dictionary, if such a thing existed.

  "Exactly." He clasped his hands behind his back, his feet placed just precisely so. "There are some things that cannot be explained, even between us. Whether we founder on them or learn to leave them unsaid, I leave to you." He turned on one heel, his long black coat flaring with a sound like feathers rippling. "You should gain some rest. We will be there sooner than you think."

  "Where?"

  "Where else would Lucifer meet us? Where he can see us coming." With that, he was gone through a hatch door, a brief slice of daylight outside stinging my eyes.

  I let out a sharp breath. The shaking in my arms and legs circled like a beast waiting to pounce.

  I drew the first half of the Knife from its sheath. It was awkward, but I hitched one hip against the shelflike medbay bed and compared the two wooden weapons. They both looked complete, but after a few moments my brain started to work and I saw how they could be fitted together, by tangling the finials and twisting just so. They hummed, my hands drawing together as if I held two powerful electromagnets, thrumming their attraction almost audibly.

  I slid them together with infinite care, my almost-translucent fingernails still bearing chips and flecks of black molecule-drip polish. They matched the mellow glow of the wood, and the humming intensified until I gave the final twist, locking both halves of the Knife into place.

  Power drew heavy and close in the confined space. The hover bounced, and the Knife's hum dropped below the audible. The world warped around it, the same kind of seaweed drifting I remembered around the edges of a door torn in the fabric of the world. The geometry of the Knife was slightly off, for all its grace, yet it looked at home in my grasp, the finials caging and protecting my slim golden hand. The blade, now leaf-shaped and slightly curved, looked wicked enough to do some damage just sitting there, and I suddenly had no trouble believing this thing could kill any demon it chose.

  Still, it didn't do the other women any good. Don't get cocky, Danny.

  Had Sephrimel's hedaira ever held this thing? If I tried, could I find any traces of the women who might have thought they could wield it locked under its glossy surface? Psychometry wasn't a skill of mine; I was no Reader.

  And it was only made of wood, from some unspeakable tree I couldn't imagine.

  The Knife hummed. It was power, and control, and a way to end this madness so I could breathe again. So I could think again, without the black hole in my head threatening to drive me insane, without the hole in my heart that kept crying Japhrimel's name. Without the weight of sick grief and guilt I couldn't let myself feel if I was to function.

  "It doesn't matter," I whispered to the empty air. Because it didn't. It didn't make a damn bit of difference whether I could trust Japhrimel or not. We were locked into this course, like an AI locking in a freight hover. Like a Greater Work of magick completing itself, snapping home and driving a change into the fabric of the world, reshaping reality according to its own laws.

  He would either hold up his end of the deal or he wouldn't. Either way, a demon or two — or more — was going to die. I was going to see this thing finished. Nothing else mattered.

  Chapter 34

  There's no pretty way to describe the Vegas Waste.

  The nucleus is an immense slag-crater full of radiation and thin glass where silica sand fused together, broken by twisted screaming shapes of ferrous metal. On the outside edges, the Ghost City slumps and crawls. Even from the air bones are visible, buried in drifts of sand that ride up and fall away so the entire place shifts. Moaning wind is the only sound left.

  Once, the city stretched into the desert, full of gambling, liquor, and the peculiar Merican Era duo of fleshly urges and frantic penance for those urges. The Gilead government was like every other totalitarian regime — the ones in power wanted a playground, and Vegas was nothing if not accommodating.

  Maybe the hard-line Republic thought it was being tricky by moving its StratComm into the city once it was pushed out of DeeSee by opposition forces after Kochba bar Gilead's assassination. Maybe they had nowhere else to go, having been blown out of the Coloradin Bunkers in massive firefights. Maybe it was just sheer disorganization.

  Whatever it was, their threat of nuclear strike was met by an actual nuclear strike. Nobody after the Seventy Days War took responsibility for actually giving the codes to drop the bomb. Whoever did it saved plenty of lives — the hard-liners weren't going to go out quietly, and they had enough fanatics and material to wage war for a while, especially in the mountainous regions.

  But whoever did it also slaughtered a million civilians if not more, not just in the first bomb-blast but also in radiation sickness and pure misery in camps afterward as the provisional government struggled to figure out who was a Gilead guerilla and who was a civilian.

  McKinley was in the cockpit, guiding the hover over the shallow dips and crests of desert. Acres of broken ruins stretched in every direction, old crumbling concrete and real steel too twisted and heavy to be salvaged, crusted with rust. Glaring light reflected from sand in shimmering dapples wherever there was a porthole, casting weird shadows into the interior. The hover was slim, much smaller than our previous version, with no extraneous chambers. The cargo bay was open, a deep narrow well bare except for one pale-haired demon trapped again in a silver-writhing circle, her face tilted back to look at me above her.

  I had my scabbarded sword in my left hand and the Knife in my right, its hum rivaling hoverwhine. Behind the cockpit, Vann leaned against the hull, occasionally exchanging soft words with McKinley. Japhrimel loomed behind them, his hands clasped behind his back, his hair gleaming. And, wonder of wonders, Anton Kgembe, his springy hair wildly mussed, shot an indecipherable glance at me before leaning toward Japh to whisper, very fucking familiar, into Japh's ear.

  Plot and counterplot, double agents and deception. Where was Leander? Had he survived whatever had happened to the last hover?

  Lucas, arms folded and a scowl settled over his thin sallow face, stood at the railing at my right shoulder. "You shouldna done that."

  You shouldn't have pointed a gun at me. You're working for me. Or at least, you said you were. "I already said I was sorry." I sounded unhelpful even to myself "I'm having kind of a bad week, Lucas."

  "Not used to my clients tryin' to kill me. I've put rabid bounty hunters down for less. ' He shifted his weight as the hover tilted, wind pressure moving against its skin.

  My back prickled. I swallowed my temper with an almost sweat-inducing effort. "You were firing on her." And on me, come to think of it.

  "Orders. Your boyfriend's got better sense than you." The sneer loading his whisper was almost visible.

  "So you're working for him now?" I stared at Eve's pale head, the ropes of her hair stirring as she crouched immobile in the empty cargo bay. The humming line of silver tautened as her shoulders came up, as if she felt my gaze. "Just so I'm clear on this, because I thought I hired you." When he didn't respond, I considered the point carried. "Fuck you, Lucas."

  "No way, chica. You to
o high-maintenance."

  "Now is not a good time to bait me." I just might do something silly.

  He was unimpressed. "Not a good time to try to kill me, either."

  "You welshed on me!" I rounded on him. "I'm warning you, Lucas. Don't ride me. I'm not in the mood.

  "I been watchin' this whole thing play out. ' His yellow eyes narrowed, and despite his slumped shoulders and crossed arms Lucas was on a hair trigger. If he twitched for a knife or a plasgun, what was I going to do?

  The engine of chance and consequence inside my head returned the only answer possible. If he moved on me, we were going to find out if he was as deathless as everyone claimed.

  Once, before Japh changed me, I stood in a Nuevo Rio deadhead bar with a demon in my shadow, facing down Villalobos, almost too terrified to talk. And now there was only the calm, almost-rational consideration of how I'd kill him before he could return the favor.

  My, how times change.

  He continued, and I forced myself to pay attention. "I gotta admit, you were smart when it started. But you gettin' dumber and dumber. Wind you up and watch you knock down everything in your way's kind of fun, but it don't get the job done.

  "Where's Leander?" I didn't want to hear how stupid Villalobos thought I was. I didn't care if I was stupid or not. All I wanted right now was a chance to kill a demon, and I was getting to the point where I wasn't too picky which one.

  Lucas stared through me. His lean sallow face was the picture of contempt. "You just gettin' around to wondering? Glad you didn't get a crush on me, or I might be in even more trouble."

  That was uncalled-for. Icouldn't drop my eyes, trained reflex resisting the urge to look away. "Keep your goddamn commentary to yourself, Villalobos." If Leander hadn't been able to keep up, would Kgembe be any different?

  Was it horrible that I didn't care? The thought was a pinch in a numb place. He was human.

  But he'd taken his chances.

  You sound just like a demon, Dante. He took his chances, so sorry, too bad. I shifted, restlessly.

  "What if you need to hear it? You've fucked this up six ways from Sunday and it's only goin' to get worse. I always see a job through, but —"