HUTCHINSON’S BOOKS, USED & RARE, glowed in faded gold leaf on the wide dusty front window. I remembered how proud he’d been when we’d changed the name over from Chatham’s, and how soon the gold leaf had started to look dry and dusty, like it had never been anything else.
He’d left the desktop, and while it booted up I grabbed a couple references from the other part of the store—the climate-controlled bit where he kept a hunter’s library. That library earned him some nice tax breaks and justified me saving his bacon when he was caught hacking something he shouldn’t be. Weedy little Hutch thought he was ten feet tall and bulletproof in cyberspace, and it didn’t help that he was usually right.
I stacked the D’Aventine and Miguel de la Foya on the desk, sweeping aside a clutter of paper and setting a cup of moldering coffee higher up on the file cabinet behind his antique cubbyholed desk. The place was beginning to smell of sharpish rot and neglect, the dust and paper covering the peppery tang of a refugee emergency. I hadn’t given him much time to pack.
I was grateful I’d sent him off, however.
Everyone you love. Every one you cast your eye upon.
Was Perry really that jealous? Or was it just a way to distract me? To keep me running until—
The monitor blinked. I flipped open the D’Aventine, checking the binder that had been right next to it—a laboriously cross-checked index, and an old one. Hutch had bitched endlessly about the old dot-matrix even after he’d gone through two new laser printers by now, the same way old ladies complain about beaus who jilted them in youth. I’d learned to just make another pot of coffee when he started in on that.
I wrote down page numbers and checked the de la Foya and the Scribus Aeternum, tapping a pencil while I scanned. I checked Kelley’s Habits of the Damned and Carré’s The Outbreak of 1929: Its Causes and Effects. Also, Hartmann’s Catholic Myths and Artur Fountaine’s La guerre d’Inferne.
I knew what I was looking for. Confirmation and explication instead of a needle in a haystack. Still, I came up empty. Nothing about a particular Spear of Destiny that would fit the bill, and nothing about Perry even in Carré, who was generally held to be the authority on ’29. Even if he was a terrible writer, he was pretty much always dead-on.
The constellation of intangibles that made the Outbreak possible—astronomical and astrological energies aligned to weaken the walls between the Visible and the other worlds, the Infernals collecting Talismans used to power the Portals in different locations, the carefully nurtured scurf infestations and overheated economy—were monstrous enough. Some Infernals have admitted there was a Leader who forced an alliance long enough for the portals to be achieved synchronously on different continents; there are even whispers of a full-blown hellmouth that stood for hours, admitting a flood of Infernals to our helpless world—
He goes on for pages, refusing to speculate further but giving tantalizing hints, reporting rumors and in the next breath reminding the reader to rely only on the things that can be verified. The trouble is, ’breed don’t like appearing in the historical record. Carré had been a researcher much like Hutch; he’d disappeared in 1942. The hunter he’d been attached to—Simon Saint-Just—had also gone missing.
It had not been a good time to be a hunter in Europe. Hell, things had been bad all over, and it wasn’t until the mid-sixties that we got some sort of handle on things.
A hellmouth. A full-blown hellmouth, instead of the barriers between here and the hellbreed home gapping for just an instant to let a single monster through. Perry certainly didn’t dream small, and if it had happened once before, it could be done again.
A Leader who forced an alliance… What had Perry said to me, more than once?
I cannot hold back the tide forever. I’d stopped one of his bosses from coming through twice now. Or more precisely, Belisa had stopped him last time, before I’d shot her.
And damned myself.
Each time, the big bad boss had been struggling to step through a fractional gap, sliding into the fleshly world. That was bad enough. A full-blown hellmouth—a passageway to Hell held open for God knows how long—was going to be exponentially worse.
How’s he going to power it? Ten to one says this Lanza del Destino. Major Talismans of a certain type can power a hellmouth for a while, but I can’t think of a Spear that applies. I sighed, rolled my head back on my sore, aching neck. The dogsbody dozed near the front door, seeming content just to lay there.
Was I going to have to feed it soon? Did they stock hellbreed dog chow at the supermarket? I wondered briefly if that was tax-deductible and closed Carré with a snap. Hutch was going to have a fit if I didn’t reshelve everything.
Well, if he has one, it’ll mean I’m around to see it. That’d be nice. I considered the screensaver for a moment—pictures of cats with weird captions, shuffling by in random order. It vanished as soon as I tapped the space key.
“Okay,” I said to the dusty silence. The air conditioner kicked on, cool air soughing through the store and Hutch’s silent, dark apartment upstairs. “Let’s hope digital is better than analog for this, huh?”
It took me two hours of hunt-and-pecking and cross-referencing, broken only by a trip upstairs to make some coffee. Hutch’s fridge was unhappy in the extreme, so I left it closed after grabbing the canister of espresso-ground. I considered taking the garbage out, but one peek under the sink convinced me it was best left to itself. I was trying to stop a catastrophe here, not playing Molly Maid.
Halfway through that pot of java, I leaned toward the computer screen. I’d finally signed into Hutch’s remote worktop, seeing what he’d pulled up recently. It was eerie that I could see what he’d last been looking at and when—he’d been up late last night, not going to bed until near dawn. I would’ve been on Beacon Hill by then.
All excited about a woodcut, Devi had said. There were plenty of files in the image folder, I started going through them methodically. They bloomed over the expensive flatscreen monitor, and most of them were Perry.
Bingo.
Here Perry was caught by a telephoto lens, a black-and-white of him getting out of a car on a city street. The back of the photo, part of the same image file, held Mikhail’s spiky backward-leaning script: 1969, Buenos Aires. Another, this one in glaring color, clipped from a newspaper archive, all about new management at the Monde Nuit, decades later.
I stared at the date.
It was right after Mikhail had pulled me out of the snow. I shook my head, silver chiming in my hair. Huh.
Another black-and-white, Perry leaning against a bar and smiling, white fedora pushed back on his head, his shark smile showing up in the mirror between gleaming bottles. Berlin, 1934. Back when the first Jack Karma was working Germany. That was pretty much the first mention of him I’d ever been able to dig up.
I found the woodcut just as another scalding cup of coffee was going down. Mid-sixteenth century, originally from Bremen, now part of a museum collection. Thick black inked lines; the carver had been a genius. It was small as such things went, but exquisitely detailed—two cavorting figures under a full moon, facing a tall thin man in a long dark coat, his broadsword slanting up and flames running along its edge. He was unquestionably a hunter, and a long thin casket lay on the ground behind him. The title was Der Schutz der ersten Spear, and an electric bolt shot through me.
The two attackers leered. One of them was unquestionably the late and unlamented piebald Halis, floppy hair and all, claws and teeth bared.
The other was Perry, a spot of white in the woodcut’s florid lines, a slim orchid.
“Oh, you son of a bitch,” I whispered. “I’ve got you now.”
Only I didn’t. It took most of the afternoon before I had him, and when I did I was sweating, my teeth were chattering, and Hutch had run out of coffee.