Night fell hard on Santa Luz, sinking her teeth in and shaking a little. Neon greased the dry streets, and the whole city was restless.
I walked into the Monde like I owned the place, steel-shod heels clicking and my coat swinging heavily. I hadn’t stopped to clean up, so I was covered in hellhound filth, but I had borrowed a handful’s worth more of charms from Anya. I tied them into my hair while sitting in the parking lot, in Gilberto’s little Volkswagen.
As armor, they sucked, even though they ran with blue light the deeper I penetrated the etheric bruising laying over the nightclub. But I had my gear, and my coat, and my aura flaming with bright spikes. I had the eyeliner, now smeared and messy enough to make me look bruised under the scrim of decay. I had all the ammo I could carry.
I even had a couple grenades; they’d been packed in the trunk. Gilberto was a sneaky little boy, but right now, I wasn’t going to scold him. No, I was just going to hope he was sneaky enough to stay one hop ahead of everyone.
Just like me.
The damned pressed close. All hellbreed tonight, and all beautiful. Every single one of them aware of me as I forced my way to the bar. And it was time for another shock, because in addition to the two Traders dispensing libations there was a familiar, lined face and a pair of filmed, sightless eyes. Riverson’s hair was a shock of white, and he moved with jerky, mechanical quickness. Every motion looked painful.
Serves you right, motherfucker. Still, he’d tried to warn me. Too late and too little, but he’d tried.
Unless that was part of Perry’s royal mindfuck, too.
Riverson went dead still as I approached, one of his hands holding a bottle of Stoli, the other cupped around a delicate fluted glass. I didn’t quite turn my back on the mass of ’breed writhing on the dance floor. The damage from my earlier visit had been repaired, and the disco ball was sending little screaming jets of light all over. Whenever the lights paused, you could see they were shaped like skulls. Laughing little skulls.
Well, that’s an interior decorating trend that’s never going to hit the big time. At least, I hope it won’t. It’s so fucking tacky. I reached over, quick as a snake, and grabbed the Stoli bottle. Took a healthy slug, saluted Riverson. “Well, hello, you helltrading sonofabitch,” I yelled over the noise. “How’s tricks?”
His mouth worked wetly for a moment. One of his teeth had been broken, a jagged stub that must have hurt like hell. His fingers tightened on the glass. “You shouldn’t be here!” he finally yelled back. “God damn it, Kismet, you shouldn’t be here!”
I took another belt. As a bracer, it didn’t do much. The thought of Gilberto out in the dark, deep in Riverhurst with a voodoo king who made most Traders look sweet and innocent, was better.
Still, Melendez was at least as frightened of me as he was of Perry. He’d keep Gil safe tonight and put his part of the plan in motion. More than that I couldn’t ask for—and if he didn’t take care of my apprentice I would come back and do more than break a few dishes.
I was through with fucking around.
Riverson stiffened. The glass shattered in his hand, and all expression left his face as blood welled between his clutching fingers.
I felt him arrive like a storm front, a flash of paleness and his fingers were over mine. Perry took the vodka bottle, raised it to his lips, and grinned at me, the blandness dropping for a moment. High cheekbones, bladed nose, sterile beauty shining briefly before the screen of average came back up. His bright blue gaze fastened on me, indigo threads staining his whites with an inky vein-map, and the music took on fresh frenetic urgency.
The disco ball sped up, and the assorted hellbreed leapt and gamboled. They drifted away from the bar to pack the dance floor, faces blank and beautiful, the twisting of rot underneath candygloss corruption flickering through them like wind through high wheat.
The woman, Mikhail had reminded me so often, has advantage in bargain like this.
And God, I was hoping it was true.
“You shouldn’t be here.” Perry’s lips shaped the words, they sliced through the jet roar with no difficulty at all. “Not yet.”
Come on, Jill. This is just like working a sharkjohn. The kind that will pay double if you perform according to his little script. The cold calculation wasn’t a hunter’s totting up of percentages and averages—no, this was an older feeling.
It was the mental scrabble that lights a ratlike gleam in a quarry’s eyes. The how can I make this work for me gleam, the one my mother used to get when her boyfriends got too drunk or too loud and she started thinking about how to make their attention fasten on something else, anything else.
Even me.
My right hand flicked forward. I grabbed the bottle, slid it out of his hand, and took another hit. The glass was too warm, body-warm, and the thought that his lips had touched it sent a bolt of hot nausea through me.
I tipped the bottle further. Liquid chugged and churned. I kept swallowing, and Perry’s gaze dropped. Not high enough to be watching my mouth, not low enough to be watching my chest.
He was staring at my throat as it worked, the liquor sliding down and exploding in my stomach, a brief heat lightning. The tip of Perry’s cherry-red tongue poked out, for just a bare second, gleaming wet and rough-scaled.
The last of the vodka vanished down my throat. I slammed the bottle down, a gun crack that managed to cut through the music. My apprentice-ring spat a single spark, bright blue and quickly snuffed.
“Do svidanye,” I yelled, and I grinned with all the sunny good humor I could muster. “Hello and good night!”
Perry cocked his blond head. The light ran over him, the tiny skulldapples screaming as they touched the pressed linen of his suit. He was even wearing bleached suede wingtips, for God’s sake.
You’re carrying this much too far. Maybe the vodka was affecting me after all. But no, I just felt cold all the way through. Making myself ice, the real me curling up inside my head and a stranger taking over.
The stranger was hard and cruel, and she had no trouble surviving. She’d shot Val in the head, and she was the one Mikhail had rescued from a snowbank that night. It was probably her who made me refuse to die. Certainly she’d been the one who had pulled the trigger in that circle of banefire, breaking my skull and brain open for the hornets to devour.
I might be weak, but that bitch never gave up. And I was going to need all of her to pull this off.
Okay, Jill. It’s time to start the game.
Still grinning like a goddamn fool, I reached out.
And I grabbed Perry’s hand.