From Hell (6 page)

I grinned. “It just so happens, I was
out here for a reason.”

She put her hands on her
hips and jutted out her chest, a sure sign I was about to have my
ear gnawed off, but she never got started. A parade of heavy boots
stomped up to the end of the alley. I glanced around Scarlett as
she turned, both of us spotting the dozen or so men sealing off the
exit. Each carried a short truncheon or knife of some kind, several
of them holding blackjacks that
hissed
as they shook them our
direction. The men glared, and I could feel the heat of their eyes
as they approached.

Scarlett sighed and glanced over her
shoulder at me. “What did you do now?”

I shrugged. With me, it could have
been anything.

Seven

“
You aren’t wanted here,”
the first of the group said as he closed. Average of build and
height, he wasn’t very threatening. He waved his little club my
direction like a schoolmarm who’d caught me diddling under the
desk.

Scarlett shook her head and gave me
her “I knew it” look before returning her focus to the gang that
had cornered us.

“
We can work this out,
right?” I asked, not because I was scared, but I was hoping to drag
some information out of him before he and his friends tried to cave
our skulls in. The look on the guy’s face made it pretty clear we
wouldn’t be settling anything peaceably. Scarlett crept back toward
me so we were side by side.

“
We ain’t working nothing
out. Tell him, Al,” another of the men said. This one was thin and
wiry. He looked like a whiskerless rat, his nose jutting out from
his face. It was as sharp as the blade he held in his bony
hand.

“
You’ve been asking too
many questions, bloke,” Al went on. “The people of Whitechapel
don’t need your help and don’t want it. The Committee doesn’t need
you, either. It’s time for you to go away or we’re gonna bash your
teeth in, you hear?”

It didn’t take but a second to realize
these men worked for Charles Braun, the other half of the Vigilance
Committee. He’d apparently decided to take a more active role in
keeping me out of their business.

“
Actually, it’s my tongue
that makes the words come out. I’d still be able to talk without my
teeth, just so you know.”

Scarlett groaned as muttered comments
rippled through the group, all of them unflattering.

“
You’ve a way with people,
Frank.”

“
It’s genetic.” I winked
at her without taking my eyes off the men. Their demeanor told me
they’d come for a fight. It didn’t matter what I told them or
agreed to, they wanted blood and weren’t gonna walk away without it
being spilled. They just didn’t realize it was gonna be
theirs.

Rat boy inched forward, holding his
knife out before him. His nose twitched as he approached. Scarlett
reached for her blades, but I set a hand on her forearm. Her frigid
glare fell on me.

“
Ah, ah, aaaah. What would
Jesus do?” I asked. While not entirely sure myself, having never
met the guy, I figured he wouldn’t start hacking up a bunch of
humans whose most dangerous weapon was their stupidity.

She shook my hand off, but her fingers
moved from her swords. “Don’t ever speak of the Son. Were he alive,
he would descend from Heaven if only to save me from your
insolence”

I forced a serious face
and nodded. Scarlett was touchy when it came to the Trinity:
Father, Son, and Holy Hostess or whatever the last one was. She
hated when I joked about them, as if she expected
me
to have the same kind
of reverence she did. That wasn’t the case.

“
Jesus saves? Of course he
does; he’s a Jew.”

Scarlett growled and clenched her
fists so tight the knuckles glowed white.

“
You
might
want to pay attention,
sweetheart.” I pointed at rat boy as he leapt forward, apparently
feeling left out of the hostility. He wasn’t for long.

She spun about and grabbed
Rat’s wrist. A sharp twist snapped the bones with a
crack
. He screamed and
dropped the blade, going silent when Scarlett slammed her fist into
his jaw. Teeth clacked together and he dropped the moment she let
go of his arm.

“
Get ‘em,” Al yelled, his
voice like a struck match.

“
I blame you,” Scarlett
told me as she settled into her stance.

There was only enough time for me to
nod before the rest of the thugs charged. Al came straight at me.
I’d expected him to hold back a little after Scarlett’s display,
but he apparently didn’t hold rat boy in high regard, being dropped
by a woman and all. His machismo was gonna get him hurt.

Al stomped over his buddy,
planting a boot in his ribs as he launched himself at me. While
Baalth regularly kicked my ass for sparring mistakes, there was one
lesson that had stuck after a particularly uncomfortable violation
of my temporal integrity:
Never leave the
ground in a fight.
Momentum is a
motherfucker.

I sidestepped and latched onto Al’s
arm, turning my hip into him. His eyes went wide, and then he was
sailing over my shoulder, feet flailing in free fall. He let out a
short, sharp gasp just before he hit the ground with a meaty slap,
going silent an instant later. The stones vibrated beneath my feet
at the impact while his truncheon bounced away, disappearing into
the trash. Certain Al was out of commission I turned to the others
just in time to catch a blackjack to the face.

Stars exploded in my
brainpan as my head snapped sideways on my neck. The sand and
gravel in the sack crunched, setting my ears to ringing. My cheek
throbbed, and I looked back to the guy who’d thumped me. A smile
oozed to my lips at his obvious surprise. He’d expected me to go
down, but I’m not
that
easy. I wasn’t even getting dinner out of this.

“
You hit like a girl,” I
told him.

With no magic empowering his weapon,
he didn’t stand a chance of taking me out. He stood with the
blackjack swinging uselessly from his fingers as if he’d come to
the same realization. The guy was likely still contemplating that
when I kicked him in the coin purse. He shrieked and went fetal,
hands clasping at his busted junk.

A body flew past me and crashed into
the wall, kicking up a swirl of gray dust as it knocked the mortar
loose. The thug slid down the wall to lie limp in the piles of
debris on the alley floor. The remaining thugs held their ground.
Scarlett had taken a toll on them while I’d danced with Al and his
buddy. There were only five still standing, and none of them seemed
all that interested in being the next in line. Their hesitance made
my next move easy.

I pulled out the Webley and cocked the
hammer back. The sound echoed in the now silent
alleyway.

“
I thought you
said—”

A raised finger cut Scarlett off
before she could finish. That was all it took. Not two seconds
later, the last of the men had turned tail and run out of the
alley, leaving us alone with their fallen comrades. I smiled and
eased the hammer home, slipping the pistol back into my
pocket.

“
Sometimes a bluff is as
good as the real thing.”

Scarlett snorted. “That deluded motto
explains your sex life.”

I raised an eyebrow and
glared at her. Scarlett grinned wide, brilliant teeth shining.
She’d clearly been spending too much time with me. “Good
one.”
Bitch.

She chuckled and walked to the end of
the alley, carefully peering around the corner. Her smile slid from
her lips like mud washed away by rain.

“
What is it?”

“
You feel
that?”

The tickle of her senses washed over
me so I turned mine loose. For a moment, I felt nothing but
Scarlett’s presence, her power overwhelming in its brightness. I
willed my senses to focus, blocking her out, but it was slow going.
Unlike Scarlett, I wasn’t a natural talent at magic. My inherent
abilities were dimmer than hers, less sensitive. Where the flutter
of butterfly wings might warn her of a presence, it took a brick to
the face for me to recognize the same energies.

Without waiting for me, she started
off. I raced to catch up. A cold sweat dotted my brow as I pushed
to rein my senses in tighter, to target them. Around the corner and
a few meters down the walk, I finally caught a glimmer of what she
was chasing.

Little more than a wisp, there were
hazy traces of residual magic dotting the air like bread crumbs.
They were as delicate as a faery farts in a hurricane, but Scarlett
walked on with purpose, tracking them with apparent ease. A
bloodhound on the trail, she turned down a side street, and then
came to a sudden stop. I walked up alongside her and followed her
gaze across the road. That’s when it hit me.

The vague energy Scarlett had picked
up was the same as what I’d noticed during my flight from the
police. It was also the same I’d hit on at the bar. My stomach
tightened into a knot as things fell into place. The guy I’d
followed was lurking across the street. He was either hoping to
avoid us or was waiting for the opportunity to spring an ambush,
but that wasn’t what bothered me. Baalth hadn’t said anything about
magic before I’d left Hell, but here it was, plain as warts on a
leper. It didn’t make me feel good about confronting the guy now
that I’d had a good chance to examine the energies he was putting
off.

Whoever he was, he wasn’t
normal.

Dilapidated tenements sat jumbled just
the other side of the walk. A gas lamp flickered at the far end of
the street, but it did little to illuminate the small apartments
swallowed in shadow. There were plenty of places for our guy to
hide.

Scarlett drew a deep breath and
started across the street at a measured pace. That didn’t help my
confidence any. She was always the fearless one; God by her side,
yea, though I walk, blah, blah, blah, and all that. The fact that
she looked uncertain worried me. Neither Lucifer nor Baalth
mentioned the likelihood of supernatural involvement.

“
You sure about this?” I
whispered.

Scarlett shrugged but kept walking.
She eased her swords from their scabbards without a sound. I
followed suit, only a little more comfortable with the Bull Dog
nestled in my sweaty palm. The mystical reverberations grew as we
crossed the road, but as we drew closer, the feeling
changed.

Normally, the magical presence of a
living being exudes a different kind of energy than an inanimate
object. There’s more warmth to the feeling, a sense of life that
radiates off the person. Most humans barely flicker, their auras
dim and cool. My uncle, however, burns like the sun when he’s not
holding his power in check. Scarlett is more like a cozy campfire
you’d curl up next to on a cold night. The trail we were following
was little more than the flicker of a candle, and it had chilled
somewhat since we started across the street. The sense of humanity,
of living matter, was fading to be replaced by the still, calm
energies that rippled like the surface of a lake. Scarlett glanced
at me with the same puzzled expression I presumed I
wore.

We followed the energy along the walk
until we came to the front of one of the ragtag apartments near the
end of the building. It only took a moment then to realize we
hadn’t been tracking a person. On the wall of the apartment, little
more than a few scratches to an untrained eye, was a tiny sigil set
just inches from the doorframe. Warmth flooded me as we stared at
it, innate magic pressing against my senses.

The symbol was a concealment ward,
meant to obscure an object, make it harder to identify or even
notice without concentrated effort. It had been drawn hastily,
recently even, which made its energies ebb and flow, giving it
away. That was why I’d connected it to the man I’d followed out of
the bar. His presence was leaking from the ward because of the
sloppy nature of its construction. While the spell might have kept
the humans from examining the room, the drip, drip, drip of magical
energy only drew our attention. Up close, it practically screamed
for us to look at it. There was no doubt we’d found something we
weren’t meant to.

My eyes unconsciously glanced up at
the painted number above the door. Its gloss had long since faded,
but it could still be read easily enough. Scarlett and I sighed in
unison.

The number was
thirteen
. There was no
way that was a coincidence.

“
You see?” She pointed at
the number as though I could have missed it, reiterating my own
thought. It didn’t mean Hell was involved, but I definitely
understood why she might think so.

My senses stymied by ward, no matter
how badly crafted it was, I couldn’t get a bead on anything on the
other side of the door. “Anyone inside?”

She shrugged.

“
Great.” I glanced around
to see if anyone was out on the street, but it remained dark and
quiet. It being Saturday night, I expected more folks out on the
street but the area was desolate, deserted. There weren’t even any
cats or dogs prowling about. Maybe the ward was working on a
subconscious level to keep the locals away. I was pretty
knowledgeable in sigils, having had them drilled into my head by
Baalth and my uncle, but each instance was influenced by the will
of the caster. There was no telling what twists he’d imbedded when
he slapped it on the wall.