Hunter's Prayer (23 page)

He might even have heard the thought, because he glanced at me, his mouth pulled tight in resignation. No, he wasn’t happy at all. But he said nothing, merely giving the slight headshake that meant he would wait until we were alone.

Uh-oh.
I made up my mind. “All right. Perry, you can take the Sorrow back to the Monde and wait for me. If all hell breaks lo—”

“No.” Perry leaned against the back of the chair. Belisa cringed away from him, and bile rose in my throat.
Stop it. Don’t feel sorry for her. That’s like feeling sorry for the rattlesnake a bobcat’s playing with.

But still, she cringed just like a hooker waiting for a pimp’s slap. And I knew what that felt like, didn’t I.

Every blessed thing about this case seemed engineered to remind me what that fucking felt like.

“Excuse me?” The temperature might have dropped a few degrees, or it might have been my tone. “Last time I looked, Perry, you weren’t the one in charge here.”

“I brought you the Sorrow. You promised to stay in my sight for the duration.” The scar on my arm prickled wetly, as if he had just licked it, and I steeled myself.

“I didn’t—” I began.

Perry gestured languidly with the glass, his tone laden with flat finality. “The creature’s dead. Very well, very good. But you are my investment, dear Kiss, and I am not about to let another little viper such as this one interfere with my very
interesting
plans for your education. That wouldn’t be very wise of me, would it.”

“You’re not known for wisdom, Perry. A certain type of cunning, maybe, but not wisdom.” It was out before I could stop myself. “Cut the crap. You want to go along? Why should I let
you
wander into a fire zone where I’ll have to split my focus between worrying about what’s in front of me
and
worry about you slipping a knife into my back?”

Even I couldn’t quite believe I’d said it. Saul didn’t move, but I felt his attention sharpen, and reminded myself that he was Were. If Perry moved on me, Saul might try to stop him, and however fast and dangerous a Were was, a hellbreed who could produce flame in the blue spectrum was not my idea of a good time.

And I needed Saul alive.

Amazingly, Perry laughed. But Belisa was suddenly examining me, her mouth slightly open, as if a new thought had occurred to her.

“There are more enjoyable things to do than slip a knife between your ribs, my dear Kiss.” He saluted me with his glass, then downed the rest of the whiskey, rolling it around in his mouth and swallowing. “Now, just tell us where the icky little Sorrows hidey-hole is, and we’ll finish this matter and turn our attention to other things.” He reached down and gently, delicately smoothed Melisande Belisa’s sleek dark hair. “Like what I should do to teach this viper some manners. We have a room at the Monde specifically reserved for—”

White-hot rage boiled up. I snapped.

I had the gun out, barely aware of drawing it. I was on my feet, my shins hitting the coffee table with a short sharp sound. Then I’d leapt on the coffee table, still forward, and ended up with my feet between Belisa’s, the gun pressed to Perry’s forehead.

Oh, Jesus Christ, Jill, you stupid little prat.

I didn’t look down. “Your services are no longer necessary, Pericles,” I informed him. Even, level, and with my unprotected belly less than three feet away from a Sorrow who probably wouldn’t cry too much in her coffee if I ended up with a serious case of dead.

But she needs someone to take on Inez for her. That’s why she bothered meeting me at the hospital, that’s why she let Perry catch her, that’s why she’s still sitting here instead of trying to escape. Isn’t it?

His eyes were so deeply, infinitely blue, indigo clouding the whites along traceries just like veins. His pale fingers tensed on the glass. “Put the gun down, Kismet.”

You will not take a woman into that room at the Monde Nuit if I can prevent it. I have had enough of seeing women raped tonight.

That room at the Monde … I knew what it was used for.

I’d seen it used. I’d seen what happened afterward.

My thumb reached up, pulled the hammer back. The sound of the 9 mm cocking was very loud in the sudden hush that seemed to have descended on the warehouse. “Get. Out.” I had to work to get the words out through the obstruction in my throat. “Of my house. Get.
Out.
”

“I am losing patience with you, Jillian. Or should I call you Judith? Didn’t you prefer tha—”

Shock slammed through me. How did he know that? How
could
he know that?

I
squeezed.

Saul yelled, a short sharp cat-coughing bark of surprise. Perry fell, dropped like a stone. Blood gouted, so much thick black blood, shooting a hellbreed in the head is messy.

No more.
My hands shook and my breath came hard and harsh.
No more.

No more of it. No more women raped, no more mindfucking, no more of it,
no goddamn more.
I could take no fucking more. And if it took killing Perry and slaughtering a houseful of Sorrows and an Elder God too, I would do it.

It was that motherfucking simple.

My hand dropped. The scar on my wrist began to burn, tearing in through my skin toward my bones. I looked down at Belisa, whose head was bowed. Her shoulders were shaking under the blue silk.

Don’t worry,
I wanted to say.
I fixed it. I stopped him. He won’t hurt you now.

The faint voice of rationality piped up. This was a
Sorrow,
the one who had killed my teacher. What the hell was I doing protecting her?

She’s still a woman. And no woman deserves Perry, dammit. Or gang-rape by hellbreed.
“Saul.” My voice cracked, my throat denying itself a killing scream. “Go get the car warmed up.”

“Jill—”

Goddammit, Saul, I’m not safe right now. I think I just did something stupid.
“Do it.”

He got up, I heard the couch squeak. Then he was gone. I heard the front door slam as I stepped back from the Sorrow who hunched in the chair, her hair falling forward over her face. The smell of rotting blood cooking in a gun barrel painted the air. My hands were shaking.
Point blank, you shot him point blank, hope that’s enough. Pray that’s enough.

And under that, the other thought, repeating like a bad record.
No more. Not to another woman. No fucking more.

“Belisa?”
I still sound like a stranger. What have I done?
“Melisande?”

Her shoulders were still shaking. And God help me, but my fingers tightened on the gun again, and it was all I could do not to shoot her too.

“Goddammit, get up. Let’s go. We’ve got a world to save, you Chaldean bitch.”

Then her face tipped up, her black eyes meeting mine, and I saw she was laughing. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and she smiled, a death’s-head grin that told me she was having a hell of a good time. Her hand stabbed forward, the broken glass ampoule spewing something that smelled oddly sweet; my body sagged, not hitting the floor because of her slim iron arms around my waist. Her fingers were at my throat, I heard a snap as she tore the ruby away and tossed it, its sweet chime as it hit the floor. I choked on the poison and heard her laughter ring in the rafters. She laughed as if she had just heard the world’s funniest joke.

Laughed, in fact, fit to die.

Blackness. I floated.

I’m dead. Any minute now I’ll see Hell again. I’ll sink into it, and they’ll start on me, every hellbreed I’ve killed, everyone I’ve laid to rest. I’ll start screaming, and it will never end, and I’ll be back on the streetcorner with the wind on the back of my legs and that car coming toward me. I will. In a moment. When I finish being dead.

Something hard against my back. Cold hardness seeping into my skin. My nerves were on fire with pain, creeping up my arms and legs. Any minute now I would wake up to find myself in Hell. There was no reason to fight it. I was dead.

Dead. Floating in a blackness that started to sting in all my fingers and toes, as if I was wrestling with a jellyfish.

Belisa. The traitorous bitch.

Did she kill me? Why? She wanted me for a diversion so she could take out this Inez bitch.

Didn’t she?

A nagging little idea began growing in the back of my mind. I tried to push it away, to concentrate on being dead, but it wouldn’t go away.

The file on you is red-flagged for a reason.
She had given a picture-perfect imitation of being scared to death of Perry, and she probably had been. One false move, one note out of tune, and he might have killed her before he could bring her to me. I certainly wouldn’t put it past him. But she’d had an ampoule of something. Poison, the Sorrows trademark. Poison in word, deed, and fact.

Belisa knew too much.
This was, again, Mikhail’s voice.
Far too much. How she know what the redhead bitch is planning? And here is thought, milaya, is there reason why you haven’t seen zis redhead Sorrow yet? There’s such a thing as wigs.

But that made no sense, did it? Nothing about this made much sense.

Wake up, kitten.
The tone of my conscience changed, mutated into a voice I knew as well as my own, deep and soft. Saul’s voice, whispered in my ear. At least he’d been outside when Belisa made her move.
Time to wake up. Come on.

But I was dead, and I was so
tired.
So goddamn tired of it all. Being a hunter is just one disgusting fight after another, and there were endlessly inventive ways people could be shot, stabbed, tortured, burned, hurt. Every hunter got tired of seeing it, even if we were luckier than the cops who only dealt with humans. A hunter had to remind himself—or herself—about
why
we did this. Why we put ourselves through this.

Well, why, cream puff?
This time the voice wasn’t Saul’s or Mikhail’s. It was another voice, one I knew very well, the voice of a man who had picked up a lonely shivering girl and made her feel worthwhile, made her feel
loved,
before he’d turned her out on the street and set her to earning her keep.
Why d’ya do it at all, then?

I didn’t want to hear Val; I’d
killed
him. I pushed that voice away with an effort so hard it felt physical, heard a shapeless sound. It sounded like someone was moaning, coming to, swimming up out of dark water. Metal clashed, and the fierce cold against my back and my heels ratcheted up another notch. It burned across my buttocks, my shoulders, digging into the back of my head and my neck. And the inside of my right wrist hurt, a sharp stabbing pain.

Oh,
shit.
Maybe I wasn’t dead.

Val’s voice wouldn’t go away.
Why d’ya do it, babydoll? Huh? You don’t do it to save the world or any fucking shit like that. You want to know why you put yourself through this?

I pushed that voice away again. I knew why I did it. I didn’t need to be reminded.

Why are you a hunter, kitten?
Saul’s voice, on the edge of breaking. We did fight, sometimes volcanically, and he had asked me once or twice
why
I seemed so determined to fling myself into the worst trouble I could find. There’s no retirement plan for hunters—none of us live that long. There’s also no Higher Authority, even though the Church trains a lot of us. If a hunter wants to quit he just
quits,
just disappears. You aren’t a hunter because you’re forced into it, or because you fill out an application and have to find a replacement.

No, a hunter
chooses
to put his body on the line. And each hunt is another conscious choice. Nobody would blame you if you stopped, backed out, laid down the sword, and walked away. As a matter of fact, that was the sanest option—part of finding an apprentice is doing everything possible to dissuade the candidate from even thinking about taking the training.

We all do zis for one reason, milaya. It is for to quiet ze screaming in our dreams. It is for to kill our own demons. And they call us heroes. Idiots.
Mikhail, again. Why was I hearing voices? I could even smell him. Vodka metabolizing out through the skin, the smell of someone raised in a different climate, foreign darkness and the smell of his hair as he leaned over me to correct my form, the copper charms tied in his hair tinkling sweetly.

His voice dropped to a whisper in the very center of my head.
Now is time for ze waking up, milaya. Wake up.

I didn’t want to. I wanted only to drift. But the stinging in my fingers and toes sharpened, as if they were coming back to life.

As if I was coming back to life.

If you do not wake up, milaya, I will hit you.

I lunged into consciousness, fully aware and awake, because when Mikhail said that he never lied. Metal clashed as I tried to leap to my feet, springing up—and was grabbed mercilessly at wrists and ankles, my head hitting cold stone as I was yanked back. Stars slammed through my head, actual bright points of light.

Shit. Oh shit.

I was on my back on cold, hard stone that felt glassy, like obsidian. And I was chained, the cold cuffs closed around ankles and wrists. Stretched out like a virgin sacrifice.

Well, if that’s what they wanted they certainly have the wrong girl.
My forlorn little laugh half-choked its way out of my throat, I blinked, breathed in a long lungful of air so cold it burned, and looked around.

I pulled against the chains first. No give, and they were orichalc-tainted titanium, just the thing to hold down a hellbreed-strong hunter. Stronger than they had any right to be, and probably with staples driven deep into the granite of the floor and concrete underneath. I pulled all four chains until I was sure I couldn’t just wriggle out. It wasn’t likely, but sometimes even Sorrows made mistakes.

Not this Sorrow. A respectable foe, smart, accurate, canny, and unwilling to take chances. Just my luck. The chains were too tight for me to pop a shoulder out of its socket and wriggle around, too.