Angel Town (8 page)

M
y knees hit the side of the bed. I stared down at him. His back was to me, and even in the dimness I could see he was skeletal. The sharp boniness of a hip under his boxers, ribs standing out in stark relief, shoulder blades like fragile wings. His head was too big for his neck, and he tipped it back. The silver moved in his hair, chiming sweetly, and a gout of something hot boiled up inside me. There was nothing in my stomach to throw up, but the shaking all through me demanded I
do
something. Kill whatever was hurting him, hold it down and put a bullet or twenty through its head—

“Jill?” A faint whisper. He inhaled, another long rasping rattle.

As if he could smell me, as filthy as I was. Shame boiled through me. God, couldn’t I
ever
be clean?

No. You’ve never been clean, and he always was. Always.

The wetness on my cheeks was either tears or blood. “God,” I whispered back. “
God.
”

That managed to make him move. Slowly, painfully, hitching one hip up, rolling. My hands were fists. One of his scarecrow hands lifted, dropped back down on the white lace coverlet. He tried again, reaching up, and I grabbed that hand with both of mine.

He jerked in surprise. For a mad moment I was sure I’d hurt him, tried to ease up, but his fingers bore down with surprising hysterical strength. He pulled, and I went down onto the bed, trying not to land on him.

His stick-thin arms closed around me. The shudders came in waves, I wasn’t sure if he was shaking, or me, or both of us, because he was saying my name. Over and over again, in that dry cricket-whisper that hurt my own throat, and I sobbed without restraint. He was
kissing
me, I realized, his thin lips landing on my bloody forehead, his leg snaking up and over me, body curled around mine as if he could hold us both down while a storm passed overhead.

Only the storm was inside my buzzing, aching head. Memory exploded, shrapnel tearing through my brain.

“I just want you to do one thing,” he said into my filthy hair. I almost cringed.

Anything. Just stay with me.
I stilled, waited.

“Just nod or shake your head. That’s all. Now listen, Jill. Do you still need me? Do you want me around?”

“I—” How could he even ask me that? Didn’t he know? Or was he saying that he felt
obligated
?

“Just nod or shake your head. I just want to know if you need me.”

It took all I had to let my chin dip, come back up in the approximation of a nod.

“Do you still want me?” God help me, did Saul sound tentative?

It was too much. “Jesus Christ.” The words exploded out of me. “Yes, Saul. Yes. Do you want me to beg? I will, if you—”

“Jill.” He interrupted me, something he barely ever did. “I want you to shut up.”

I shut up. For a few moments he just simply held me, and the clean male smell of him was enough to break down every last barrier. I tried to keep the sobs quiet, but they shook me too hard. The breeze off the desert rattled my garage door, and the last fading roll of thunder retreated.

He stroked my hair, held me, traced little patterns on my back. Cupped my nape, and purred his rumbling purr. When the sobs retreated a little, he tugged on me, and we made it to the
door to the hall, moving in a weird double-stepping dance. He was so graceful, and I was too clumsy.

He lifted me up the step, got me into the hall, heeled the door closed. My coat flapped. My boots were heavy, clicking against concrete. I probably needed to be hosed off.

I had to know. I dug in, brought him to a halt, but couldn’t raise my eyes from his chest. “A-are you s-s-still—” I couldn’t get the words out. I was shaking too hard.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” he informed me. “I’m staying, Jill. As long as you’ll have me. I can’t believe you think I’d leave you.”

I cried for a long time, there in the dark. He held me, stick arms strong for a Were who was wasting away, and he kept repeating my name.

How could I possibly have forgotten
him
? Even if I forgot myself, I would remember him. If I was blind I would know him. I hadn’t even known what I was missing, but it had been him.

I should have been looking for him as soon as I clawed up into the night and screamed.

I was. I didn’t know it, but I was.
And I couldn’t even tell if that was a lie I was telling myself or the bare honest truth, because the sobs were coming so hard and fast they shook both of us.

We curled around each other like morning glory vines, and for that short while everything else faded away. He didn’t say anything else, and neither did I.

There was no need.

It was the first good sleep I’d had since I’d come up out of the grave, and it wasn’t nearly long enough.

The gun was up, pressure on the trigger and my arm straight and braced. I blinked, and Anya Devi, her blue eyes narrowed, held both hands up, one of them freighted with a glowing-green glass bottle. “Easy there, killer.” She even sounded amused, the tiny silver hoops in her ears glinting. Her coat brushed her ankles, and I realized she was tense and ready. I wouldn’t put it past her to dodge a bullet.

But she wasn’t my enemy.

I lowered the gun, pushed myself up on one elbow.

The room was empty. Westering sunlight poured past the sheer white drapes, and crusty, dried crap crackled on my skin. I hadn’t even washed my face. I felt cotton-stuffed, the way you do if you’ve ever fallen asleep after a long wracking bout of sobbing. Like I’d been cleaned out and Novocained. My mouth tasted fucking awful, too. My foot had swollen inside the one sneaker I still had on, and I wanted a hot shower, a gallon of coffee, and some weapons.

Not necessarily in that order.

Devi answered my first question before I could ask. “He’s downstairs, eating. Has a lot of body mass to put back on.” She offered me the venom-green bottle as I sat up, sheepishly lowering the gun the rest of the way. I sniffed cautiously and smelled licorice and alcohol.

Absinthe. Devi believes in the stuff the way other people believe in football, God, or sex. Mikhail’d felt that way about vodka. Me, I can take it or leave it—I save all my love for the tools to get the job done.

No. I don’t. I save most of it for him.
The rock in my throat eased, miraculously. “Sorry.” Liquid sloshed in the bottle, I made a face. “What the fuck?”

“Good for you, cures everything. Go on, take a hit.” One corner of her mouth quirked slightly. “Or do you remember hating it?”

I lifted it to my mouth. Took a swallow. It burned all the way down, and it was unspeakably foul. “Gah.” My face squinched up, it coated the back of my throat and went off in my stomach like a bomb. But I took another long swallow. That was as brave as I could get.

It was booze, after all. And a belt was just the thing to bolster me.

She accepted the bottle back, took a long hit, her throat working. Then she lowered herself cautiously into a high-backed mission-style chair by the bed, the one thing I’d missed last night. Leather creaked as she sank down with a sigh.

“So.” She studied the bottle. “You bleed clean. That’s not a ’breed mark on your arm anymore. Couple months ago you disappeared. Found my car torched out in the desert, plus one very large crater that reeked of angry hellbreed out where those goddamn stones are. Or where they
were
, I should say, because whatever it was shattered them and fucked up the ley lines but good. We’re in the middle of a war here, and all of a sudden you show up at the Monde, bust Theron out just in time, and…” Her straight eyebrows went up, the scar down her right cheek—the claw had dug in right at the outside of her eye, like a tear—crinkling a little as her mouth twisted. The
bindi
gleamed, a sharp dart of light. I studied it while I waited for her to finish the thought.

While she decided what to do with me, was more like it. I had no illusion that anything else was going on. She was up on everything happening in my town, and I was…what?

Confused, still not thinking straight, and still exhausted.

“I bled clean before,” I managed, through the pinhole my throat had become. “Even though I had the mark.”

She said nothing. Examining me like a gunfighter, the silver in her hair glowing, her gaze disconcertingly direct, like every hunter’s. Crow’s-feet touched the outer edges of her eyes, and the lines as her mouth pulled tight against itself would only keep carving themselves deeper from now on.

It is our job to keep gazing, unflinching, on the worst Hell has to throw at us. It is our job to never look away.

When she said nothing else, the silence stretched uncomfortably. I stood it as long as I could. I itched all over, and the need to find more weapons itched as well, right under my skin where nothing but metal and ammo would scratch. “I barely even remembered my own name. I killed a Trader on a rooftop. He had a card for the Monde. I went there. Perry seemed…glad to see me.”

She let out a short, plosive breath and settled into immobility. The quality of a hunter’s concentration can spook civilians; something about our trained stillness just makes them uncomfortable. “Right into the lion’s den. Well, at least
that
hasn’t changed.”

I searched for words to boil the whole complex tangle down to its essentials. “He was…I heard Theron. I thought it was Saul. Everything came back. At least, everything up until a certain point. So I got him the hell out of there.”

“Good. He shouldn’t have been there.” She let out a sigh, her shoulders sagging for a moment. “So here’s the million-dollar question, Kismet.” She took another hit off the bottle, venom-green liquid sloshing. “You still a hunter?”

Why the hell would you ask me that?
“It’s not like I have a choice of career options.”

As soon as I said it, I knew it wasn’t strictly true. You could lay it down and walk away at any moment. Nobody would say a word, or judge you.

Idiots,
Mikhail used to snarl sometimes.
They think we do this for them. Is only one reason to do,
milaya,
and that is for to quiet screaming in our own heads.

I found out I’d laid the gun in my lap, and I was twisting the ring around my finger.
Do svidanye.

Honest silver, on vein to heart. Now it begins.
Bile crept up into my mouth. It took a few hard swallows before I could speak, the silvery insectile curtain inside my head shifting a little as…something…peeked out.

“Mikhail,” I whispered. “I found out…something. About him.”

She nodded. “You did. Here’s another million-dollar question, Kismet. Do you want the last two and a half months back? Or d’you want to head out onto the Rez with that Were of yours? There’s no…” She paused, swallowed hard. Her eyes had darkened. “There’s no obligation, Jill. You did what you had to do.”

“What did I do?” I was honestly puzzled, and the hornet buzz inside my head threatened to rise again, swallowing thought whole and triggering reaction. I shoved it away, my shoulders tensing as if I’d been hit. “That’s the one thing I can’t remember. I woke up in my own
grave
, Devi. I’m as confused as it’s possible to get. I’m digging myself up, then this guy drops me off in an alley, and all I can think of is getting some ammo. But I didn’t remember the silver, or…
Jesus
fuck-me
Christ
. Of
course
I want my goddamn memory back. What are you thinking?”

“I have…an idea.” The admission, pulled out of her. “But have you considered that you might not want your memory? That there might be things you’d prefer to forget? This isn’t the type of job that gives you happy dreams. Saul loves you, you’ve got a chance to—”

I slid off the bed. I had to get that goddamn sneaker off before it turned my foot gangrenous. “There’s a war on? Against Weres?”
And you expect me to sneak off into the sunset. Great. Well, now I know what you really think of me, right? Great.

She let out a longer sigh, one she probably practiced on her apprentices. “They’re driven into the barrio. Galina’s doing what she can, but—you remember Galina, right?”

“Of course.” I limped for the door. “I remember almost everything, up to the moment I pulled up in front of the Monde. I was working on a case, which I’m guessing is wrapped up now. Can you find me some clean clothes? And more weapons?”

“I can, but Jill—”

“I’ve got to pee.” And with that, I made an inglorious retreat out into the hall. I wasn’t lying—I really did have to piss like a racehorse.

But I was afraid that if I stayed in there any longer I’d lose my temper. Or, even worse, I would look down at the space on the bed next to me, the pillow still dented from Saul’s beautiful, wasted head, and entertain ideas of riding off into the sunset after all.

I
was taller than Anya, and broader in the hips. But the leather pants fit me just fine, and the black Angelcake Devilshake T-shirt too. I knew that wasn’t mine—I’d started buying my tees plain and in job lots, because they ended up shot and blood-drenched, not to mention sliced, diced, and dipped in unspeakable foulness so much. Just like the rest of me.

Even the sports bra and unmentionables fit just fine. There was a pair of scarred leather boots that looked damn familiar, and hugged my feet as if they’d been broken in but good.

But it was the weapons that did it.

Another modified .45, this one shiny instead of dull black. Holsters for both the old gun and the new. A complicated array of leather straps that came alive in my hands, buckling itself on like an octopus hugging me, holding weapons. Knives with silver loaded along the flats, from the big main-gauche to a slim stiletto almost lost in its sheath. Cartridges of silverjacket ammo, and the crackling-new bullwhip with wicked-sharp sweetsilver jingles at its tip, secured in its own little loop.

The coat was a little too long, a black leather trench instead of a duster like Devi’s, and it smelled like comfort. Copious pockets and more loops sewn in for the pile of ammo Devi had brought up in two paper grocery bags. The more I slipped into the loops, the better I felt.

“Thou Who,” I whispered, and shut my mouth. The prayer had no place here, but it kept going under the surface of my conscious thought. When I repeated it, the wasp-noise retreated, left me alone.

Thou Who hast given me to fight evil, protect me; keep me from harm.

Except it was useless. I’d ended up dead. There were Weres hiding in the barrio. And Anya was still here, instead of back over the mountains in her own territory, keeping the scurf down and the Traders under wraps.

The bathroom was white tile, clean as a whistle, and my dirty clothing had been whisked away by a tight-lipped Amalia. The shower was ancient, the kind with the curtain attached to a hoop bolted to the wall, and the mirror showed a gaunt woman with mismatched, exhaustion-ringed eyes and a habit of not meeting her own gaze. I was milk-pale, but the shaking in my hands went down with every weapon I strapped on.

Oh, yes. This was what I’d been missing.

The knock startled me, and I thought it was Anya. But when I swept the door open, it was him.

He was still too thin, leaning against the wall. The plaid flannel shirt and jeans hung scarecrow on him, and his hair fell in his dark eyes, scarred with small silver charms. His cheekbones stood out sharply, his proud nose a blade of bone and skin, and his mouth turned down at both corners.

My jaw dropped. I stared.

Weres are beautiful. There is no corruption in them, nothing like a hellbreed or Trader. Hunters can track ’breed; humans have an advantage in hunting what we’re akin to. But in Weres, everything is burnished. It’s humanity, yes…but with so much of the crap burned away.

He was holding something up, his expressive fingers just knobs of bone and skin. “I thought…” His voice was a rasp, he coughed and the words came a little easier. “Thought you’d want this.”

It was a stick of kohl eyeliner. I grabbed for it. “My God. Thank you. I didn’t even know I was missing—”

“Are you all right?” The words cut across mine, and all of a sudden the leather on my back didn’t feel very much like armor anymore. “What
happened
to you? I couldn’t find you anywhere, Jill. Not even the wind carried a hint. You were
gone
.”

Everyone keeps asking where I was. You’d think I’d know.
“I woke up in my own grave.” The words were beginning to sound routine.

Not really.

He stared at me. Not disbelievingly. Apparently the idea that I could wake up in my own grave wasn’t very outlandish to him.

Of course not. He knew me better than anyone.

I searched for something else to say. “I’m here now.” I clutched the eyeliner like it was going to try to escape. “The last thing I remember is screeching up to the Monde, because they’d taken you. Right outside Galina’s. Perry…”
Perry, I knew him.
I shook the thought away, damp strings of hair touching my cheeks. “Devi says she’s got a way for me to remember how the case ended up.”

He stepped forward, stopped. Braced one shoulder against the wall. I thought of the bone underneath pressing out through wasted muscle and skin, how much that had to hurt. “Are you sure you want to?”

The only thing I’m sure of right now is that every bit of firepower I strap on makes me feel better. Oh, and that I’m going to put a bullet or twelve in the head of anything that hurts you. A good grocery list to start out with, right?
“She says she can do it. She’s got an idea, I guess, and as soon as she tells me I can get started—”

“No.” A shake of his beautiful, wasted head. One of the charms—a silver wheel, tied in with faded red thread—moved against his temple. “Are you sure you want to remember?”

“I…yeah. Of course.” I backed up a step, shifted my weight as if I was going to turn. The fragile stick in my fist creaked a little, and I eased up on it. “I’ve got to. There was Perry, and Belisa was mixed up in it. The Eye, too—Gilberto’s probably got that. Gil’s at Galina’s, I’m betting.”

He thought this over, watching me, those dark eyes soft. Almost wounded.

“Yeah,” Saul finally said, heavily. “Locked up tight, poor kid. Just let me get some more food, and we’ll get going.”

That might not be such a good idea—
I opened my mouth to protest, but he beat me to it.

“Don’t even start with me.” His head dropped forward wearily, and he glared at my chin through his lackluster, silver-scarred hair. “If you’re going, I’m going. I’m not losing you again.”

“You didn’t—” I began, but I couldn’t finish. The words lodged in my throat, because I was suddenly sure that I had been lost, and in a big way.

Utterly lost.

“Here’s what I know.” He reached up, brown fingers gripping the doorjamb. “You told Theron to make sure the first thing I heard when I woke up was
She loves you
. And Devi, God damn her, always finding a reason not to be in the room when I showed up. Until I cornered her and she told me you’d been…that you’d bargained yourself away. For
me
.”

I blinked.
Was that what happened? Who did I…
My brain shivered inside its bone casing. I shuddered.

“And I couldn’t find you,” he continued. His free hand flicked, and flashes of silver chimed as they hit the floor. My gaze didn’t drop down to check, riveted to his face. “I couldn’t find you anywhere. Even
inside
. You were gone. I went half mad looking for you. Then I came back to the barrio to die.” He waved aside my instinctive protest, knobs and spindles of bone moving under his skin. “And now, here you are. Inside and out.”

“Saul—” The thing in my throat wouldn’t let anything else get past. Just his name.

He shook his head, so hard I was afraid he’d snap his wasted, scrawny neck. His fingers tensed against the jamb. Wood groaned. “No. Everywhere you go now, I’m going with you.
Everywhere.
” He turned on his heel, sharply, and stamped away. The hall almost rocked around him, one gaunt Were with the burned-candle smell of anger trailing behind him in eddies and swirls.

Even their anger is clean. It doesn’t twist into hatred. You won’t ever find a Were Trading.

But you might find a hunter Trading,
a deep voice whispered inside me.
You just might. Especially for what she loves.

What she can’t do without.

I found out I was trembling. A wave of shudders went through me, but I bent over anyway. I found the charms and tweezed them up delicately. Three of them—a tiny silver shoe like the one from the Monopoly game, a Celtic cross, an exquisitely carved spider.

It was there, on my knees, clutching the eyeliner and the small bits of silver, that it hit me.

The blue-eyed mute who had paid for my breakfast and given me my gun. He had seemed familiar. Too familiar.

And now I knew who he was. The knowledge opened up another door in my head, but only halfway.

Halfway was enough.

“Shit,” I muttered, there on the floor. “Oh, God. God.” My arms came up, and I hugged myself, rocking back and forth.

God didn’t answer.

He never does.