Dawn found me in a cemetery.
The northern side of Beacon Hill’s lush greenness looked out over the valley, the mountains rising in the distance and the river a bright colorless ribbon as the sky lightened. I sat on the wet grass, sprinklers going overtime in the dark to compensate for the desiccation that would hit later in the day. The water had stopped, thank God, but everything squelched underneath me.
I put my chin on my knees.
The dogsbody slunk closer. It settled down with a sigh, its unhealthy heat steaming in the predawn chill. Around sunrise Santa Luz always smells like metallic sand as the city inhales, filling its lungs from the wasted desert all around, mixing it with exhaust and the effluvia of thousands of people going about their lives.
The gravestone shimmered, polished white rock. I’d dug up Mikhail’s ashes a while ago and had Galina put them in one of her vaults. Still, it was here that I felt his presence most strongly, and it was here I sometimes came to talk to him. Galina’s perfectly polite, but I don’t like having conversations with my dead teacher where other people can hear.
Call me secretive.
I held myself absolutely still. The sky slowly turned gray, stars winking out and a few birds warming up for their morning chorus. What a waste it was to water the ground here. In the first place, water’s a great psychic conductor, and the grief soaking this place echoed in every molecule. And in the second, why not spend some of that water on the living? They needed it more.
The only need of the dead is to sleep unmolested.
You’re kind of sucking at that, aren’t you, Jill. I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them. The gravestone was just the same.
Mikhail Illich Tolstoi. Nothing else, not even the years of his tenure on earth. Why bother, when I would remember it and it was in the files? It wouldn’t matter to anyone else. Except maybe Gilberto, when he finished his training.
I wouldn’t be around to see that, would I.
I stirred a little, shifting to relieve muscles threatening to cramp. The dogsbody was still, its weird eyes closed and its breath softly chuffing in and out. Just like a hound, really.
I’d never had a pet.
Are you crazy? This thing’s dangerous. Plus, it’s basically hellbreed, even if Call-Me-Mike did… whatever he did to it. A shiver went through me.
I was stalling.
“Misha.” The word rode a breathy scree of air. “Mish, Misha-Mik, if you’re there, I could use a friendly ear.”
Well, strictly speaking, listening was all he could do, right? He was fucking dead. Passed on. Joined the choir eternal. Had I met him, wherever I’d been after I pulled the trigger and broke my skull open like a pumpkin dropped off an overpass?
If I rubbed under my hair, I only felt the bumps and ridges anyone’s head acquires after a few hard knocks. No shrapnel. Just a tenderness in places, like old bruising. A faint twinge.
“Why?” I whispered, staring at his grave. “Why didn’t you tell me you had a deal with Perry and you needed me to take your place? Why didn’t you tell me about Belisa? Why didn’t you take me with you? Why did you pull me out of that snowbank in the first place? Why me? And Jesus Christ, Misha, why could I come back if you couldn’t? Or is it just that you didn’t want to?”
I go to Valhalla, he’d told me more than once, where fight is like play. Like movie.
I guess that was his idea of a good time.
“Why, Misha? I would’ve done anything you asked. Hell, I would’ve given Perry a lot more to buy you free. I would…” I ran up against the wall of what I would have done, what I’d’ve given if he’d just asked me.
Why hadn’t he?
A while ago, I’d visited Melendez and Chango had deigned to speak to me. It had been a different case—the circus had come to town, and someone was looking for vengeance. Voodoo and hellbreed don’t mix, and I’d been looking to get the whole thing tied up and safely stowed before open warfare broke out and the Cirque was given free rein in my town.
You meatpuppets, Chango had snorted with magnificent disdain. You always got to know why.
“It would sure fucking help,” I muttered, and wiped at my cheeks with callused palms. Why the fuck was I crying? Another why question.
Shit.
“Was it worth it?” That was a new question. I sounded ridiculously young, and I stared at the white blur of the headstone. “Melisande. Belisa. Did you love her? Or were you just looking to get free? Was she worth it? You had me, Misha. Was I not enough?”
Of course I wasn’t enough, never had been. I’d been born without some essential thing everyone else seemed to have. There was an emptiness in me, way down deep, and even if it had been the reason everyone who should have loved me couldn’t, it was what kept me alive long enough to escape. Long enough to survive and meet Mikhail. And even then, I hadn’t been enough.
The only person who shouldn’t have loved me was Saul. And go figure, he did.
At least he’s safe. But if you end up dead again, Jill, what’s that going to do? He’ll starve. He’ll get matesick, he’ll go down. Weres don’t go to Hell, and you know that’s where you’re bound. If there was a heaven you’d’ve seen it by now. Hot water flooded my eyes, trickled down my cheeks. My nose was full. I’d given up wiping my cheeks.
“It’s not fair.” Lo and hallelujah, I was five years old again. “It’s just not fair, God damn you.”
The eastern sky was rosy. The birds burst into song, a great swell of twittering music. It stopped, started again. The hush returned, this time threaded with liquid birdsong. It was funny how noise could be a component of early-morning silence.
I was on my feet before I knew it, steel-shod heels sinking into wet grass and mud. “I should leave it here to rot. All of it. Everything. Including you, Misha. You lied to me.”
By omission, yes. But still a lie. Hunters aren’t supposed to lie to each other. When you’ve been loved so hard that the love turns into a rope that pulls you free of Hell’s cold shifting borders, you can see it in another hunter’s eyes. It’s raw and bloody and it aches, but you can’t lie to someone who’s been loved like that.
Mikhail had loved me. He’d pulled me out of Hell. What if his lie had been a mercy, instead of deceit? Why would he have done that?
Fuck. We’re back to the whys.
I held up one finger. “You loved me.” Another. “So you lied to save me. You couldn’t hold Perry off much longer. But you thought I could.”
A third finger. “Mike. The caretaker. Judas to a hell-breed. He can’t interfere much more than he already has.”
A fourth. “A Lance. And Perry planning a repeat of ’29.”
1929, the Black Year. The year when the hellbreed had opened up multiple doors, and escaped en masse from Hell’s embrace.
Unwilling, I glanced up.
The eastern horizon was a furnace. Caught in the valley, Santa Luz turned over, sighed, and began waking up. The skyscrapers glittered, and for a moment the whole city was open inside my head, the streets that made its arteries and the buildings its bones. The people moving through it, the city’s dream made flesh, but so vulnerable. They had no idea what abyss was yawning under their feet, and every night, even since before Mikhail’s death, I’d been fighting to keep them safe. There was no reward, no prize; few of them even knew my name.
So why did I do it? Why hadn’t I taken Mikhail’s other offer—therapy, education, a way off the streets, my past wiped clear and a fresh chance at life as a civilian? I’d never even considered it.
Because I’d wanted so badly to be worthy of what he’d done when he pulled me out of that snowdrift. Funny, that year it had snowed; I couldn’t remember a single white winter in the time since.
My thumb popped out. “My city.”
My city.
Now I looked at my callused palm and fingers, the lines running across flesh, the bones of my knuckles. My hand curled into a fist, and the gem muttered sleepily against my wrist. When you got right down to it, was it any different from the scar of Perry’s lips on me?
Do it for Saul. Do it for love.
“I can’t.” There it was. “There isn’t enough left in me. You made sure of that. All of you fighting for a piece of me, pushing me around like a rat in a maze. Jesus.”
What did that make me? If I couldn’t do this for love, what did it make me?
Who the fuck cares? I’m going to do it anyway. None of it matters. Except Saul.
Even if he was going to go down after I threw myself into this losing game, at least he’d be going down in a world where he had a chance. Where the hellbreed were checked. Not permanently, that would take a goddamn miracle. But I could keep the world spinning a little longer, and make it a little safer.
It didn’t matter if I was doing it for them, or for myself. At least, I wasn’t going to let it matter.
“I love you,” I told Mikhail’s headstone. For a moment I had a crazed hallucination of my right fist punching, the shock grinding the white stone to powder. I could do it, I was suddenly sure of that. Before, it had been hellbreed-jacked strength. Now the power came from somewhere else, and I didn’t have a clue what I would do if it deserted me. “Mikhail,” I whispered. “I hate you, too.”
I didn’t recognize my own voice. Irrational, sudden fear drilled through me. I hunched my shoulders and waited. One breath. Two.
Nothing happened.
I looked up again at my city. The sun’s limb lifted sleepily from the horizon, swords of gold piercing the sky, and I felt dawn in my bones like the ocean must feel its tides.
Another idea hit me. I actually rocked back on my heels, my brain jolting inside its heavy bonecase. The dogsbody lifted itself up, the imprint of its scorch on wet grass steaming, and shook itself. The flat ears pricked forward, and it stared adoringly up at me. It actually did look like a hound, and even my blue eye could find no trace of Jughead Vanner left in its long lean body.
“Shit,” I breathed. “Shit shit shit. Come on.”
The absurdity of talking to myself on Beacon Hill was enough to make me grin as I spun on my heel and left Mikhail’s glowing headstone behind. The dogsbody loped next to me as my stride lengthened, my coat flapping, and I broke into a run as the day came up like thunder.