Perry was suddenly there, slim pale fingers tensing and crackling at the man’s throat. Man, or boy, he was so slight I couldn’t tell. His ears came up to high points and his teeth were only bluntly human, but dapples of shadow-bruising ran over his skin, and his hair writhed in fat brown dreadlocks like it had a mind of its own.
He choked, and Perry hissed. The sound was freight trains rubbing together at midnight in a cold deserted yard, overstressed metal squealing in pain.
Helletöng, I realized. The language of the damned.
Which gave me all sorts of interesting ideas about the position I was in. The hiss-roar died away, and the Trader’s face turned an unpleasant purplish.
“I thought I said I wasn’t to be disturbed.” Perry cocked his head, each word quiet and level. “This had better be—”
“—caught—” The Trader choked again, and Perry eased up.
“What?” More töng, plucking at the strings below the surface of the world. I could glimpse the spreading stain, corruption welling up and torquing reality one way or another, my blue eye suddenly hot and dry. “Speak up,” Perry snarled.
He probably could, if you weren’t holding him a foot off the floor and cutting off his air. But I kept that thought to myself. It would probably be unhelpful in this situation.
It was looking like I was going to need all the help I could get. Lights were turning on inside my head, flickering in rapid fire, and the things they showed weren’t very nice at all.
“Caught one,” the Trader wheezed as the fingers in his throat loosened slightly. “We caught one. Watching us.”
“Indeed.” Perry went still for a few seconds. A hot, dry draft reeking of spoiled honey brushed the room. Even immobile, you could see his molecules trying to escape, jittering away. Under his suit coat his back shifted, something straining inside the shape he wore. Horror crawled up into my throat, my brain shivering away from the suggestion underneath. Like a twisted alien body under a blanket, so horribly wrong a chill walks up your spine with ice-glass feet.
I’ve seen that before, though. I survived seeing it. I know I did.
Perry glanced to the side, his profile severe and handsome, a classical statue’s long nose and relaxed mouth. His eyes scorched, and he made a sudden swift movement. A greenstick crack echoed, the Trader’s feet flailed, and the hellbreed dropped him like a dirty rag.
Bile whipped the back of my throat. My face stayed frozen, numb. Keep your pulse down. Training clamped down on my hindbrain; I could actually feel the pressure sinking in, hormonal balance mercilessly controlled, heartbeat and respiration struggling to escape those iron fingers.
Mikhail was always on me to keep my pulse down. I stared at the body as it slumped to the side, twitching and juddering, dusky corruption racing through its tissues. The naked, hairless chest, the ribs flared oddly to support different musculature, legs in a pair of fluttering black pants caked with something filthy and iron-smelling at the bottom. The stink of death-loosened sphincters ballooned out, exploding across the sterile unsmell, and I shivered.
Then I stilled, hoping that hadn’t been a mistake.
“There’s no need to fear.” Was he trying to sound soothing? Perry rolled his shoulders back in their sockets, cartilage crunching. “This will only take a moment, darling mine. You can even watch.”
He stood there, staring to the side, the indigo threads in the whites of his eyes swelling and retreating obscenely. As if expecting a reply.
I searched for something to say. Finally, I cleared my throat again. “Is that what’s called killing the messenger?”
He actually laughed, and the horrible thing wasn’t how loud it was. No, it was the sheer gleeful hatred, his lips smacking like I’d just told the world’s funniest joke. The laugh cut off in midstream as more swelling crackles slid around under his pale, perfect skin.
“You could say that.” He stepped daintily aside as the corpse’s legs jerked. “But it’s also a lesson. They shouldn’t interrupt me, not while I’m with you.” A sidelong glance, sipping at my face. “Come along. This should be… instructive.”
What else could I do? I followed.
Down on the ground floor, twenty seconds spent passing from one iron door to another along the edge of the vast belly of the Monde. The damned paid no attention, writhing against each other while the disco ball spun slightly faster and the music took on a screaming, spiked edge. I glanced out over their sea of chains and leather and slim legs, sweet curves and the bloom of powdery rot on each of them, and something else lit up inside my head.
Hunter, Jill. You’re a hunter. And these are what you kill.
Which opened up huge new vistas of contemplation I had no luxury to indulge in, because this second door gave onto a hall lit by low bloody neon tangles, crawling like worms against the wood-paneled walls, and my fingers tightened on the gun again. More doors marched down the hallway on either side, and again recognition rose to choke me. Little half-remembered scenes played out inside my skull, the woman who shared my body unlocking mental doors and throwing them open—just like Perry, his hair and clothes now dyed scarlet, chose a door on the left and flung it wide.
“Well, well, well,” he chanted, mincing into the room beyond. “What have we here? Oh, look. A stray cat.”
A cold spear went through me. Cat?
The last time I’d been here, these doors had all been standing open, torn-out teeth in a dead smile. Behind the one at the far end of the hall had been a table shattered to matchsticks, an iron throne demolished, and something hanging in silvery chains. Something horribly battered, and as I’d walked in the chains had rasped against each other, fat, dry-sliding tongues.
I stared down the hall. If I walked to the end, would I find a room where the table was put back together as if it had never been broken, mirror-polished and solid? And the throne at the end… would its metal spikes be repaired? Or would a new one have been brought in?
A low, terrible growl cut across the hallway. It was a cleaner sound than ’töng, and it turned another key inside the broken lock my head had become.
—pair of dark eyes, tawny sides moving, the sun picking out gold along a cat’s sleek lines, and he nuzzled my throat, kissing while I shook. The crisis tore through me again, and the kiss turned to a bite, pressure applied with infinite care, the skin bruising as he sucked. The neck’s erogenous in the extreme for a cat Were, and Saul—
Saul? I jolted back into myself. My lips shaped the word, but I said nothing.
He was important. My pulse sped a fraction, control clamped down, and I began to get a very bad feeling about all this.
“Hold it down. She’ll want to see this.” A low, delighted laugh, and the wasp-buzz was a dark curtain inside my head, bulging over some horrible, unknowable shape. “Oh, this couldn’t have been better if we’d planned it. Kiss?” Calling me, like a dog. “Kiss, my darling, come inside.”
I hated him calling me that. Another key, another broken lock, muscles hardening as I twisted it. The effort was both physical and mental, the gem on my wrist scorching, threads of silvery pain sliding up the nerve channels all the way to my elbow.
This time, the buzzing was a curtain of shining metallic insect bodies, and the gem on my wrist vibrated as the curtain pulled aside. Dawn rose inside my head, but it was the sterile white light of a nuclear sunrise, everything inside me turning over and shattering as consciousness flooded me.
Jill. Jill Kismet. Hunter.
The memories slammed through me all at once, my entire body locking down, muscles spasming and ruthlessly controlled. Fighting in the dark, night after night spent cleansing the city streets of things like the dancing mob in the belly of this building—and Perry, pulling the strings, our bargain sealed by a scarred lip-print on my right wrist.
I hated everything about him. Everything. But that wasn’t important right now. Training jacked my hormone balance, adrenaline a bright copper flood across my tongue, the bloody neon light flashing as my eyelashes fluttered. The ring was a scorch on my left hand, silver reacting to the etheric contamination filling this bruised, hollow place. I dropped back into myself with a thud, and heard Perry laugh again. A low, very satisfied chuckle, a razor against numb flesh. There was a wet sound, and the growl cut short as if a door had slammed in the middle of it.
I knew that sound. It was a Were. Probably a cat Were, too. He’d just been punched in the gut.
If there was a Were here at the Monde, he was looking at a whole lot of hurt. And if it was who I thought it was…
… I couldn’t let that happen.