Hunter's Prayer (12 page)

“Come on.” He pulled me under his arm and dragged me toward the door, the peculiar blurring of his Were camouflage beginning just at the corner of my vision. “Jesus Christ, you were only in here for a minute. Can’t I leave you alone for ten seconds without gunfire? This is a
hospital.
”

Do you really want me to answer that, Saul?
I let him pull me along, numbly.
It’s her. The bitch. It’s her.

“To hell with dead whores,” I heard myself say. “I’m going to hunt myself a Sorrow.”

Then my left hand came up, I would have clapped it over my mouth if it hadn’t still been full of heavy metal gun. “Christ,” I choked. “I think I’m going to be fucking sick.”

“Hold it for a few seconds,” he replied, practically, palming the door open and dragging me out into the hall. He got me down the hall, neatly avoiding the chaos of security guards and running nurses, and out through a fire door, adding to the general fun. I felt sorry for the poor cardiac patients, fleetingly. And sorry for Father Rosas, though he probably hadn’t heard a damn thing. She’d probably drugged him; poison and chemicals are a Sorrow’s stock-in-trade. And Guillermo would mean less than nothing to her. Belisa’s game right now was with me.

In an alley below I lost breakfast and everything I’d ever thought of eating for lunch. Saul held my hair back as I retched and swore, alternately, hearing the little gurgle of Mikhail’s life bubbling out through his throat and her laughter like tinkling glass.

All in all, for facing down Belisa again, I handled it pretty well.

15

T
his is beginning to piss me off.” I stared at the small brick building. The office on Quincoa—Kricekwesz’s—was closed again, this time at three in the afternoon. “Doesn’t this doctor ever open up?”

Saul lit a Charvil. “You want to go in and take a look around?”

My stomach flipped. I studied the front of the place: windowless because of the chance of projectiles,
Family Planning Clinic
in gold on the door that had a peephole and an intercom box with the
Closed
sign hanging from it as well as a
UPS NO!
stenciled underneath on white-painted bricks. There weren’t any protestors out here, and I supposed that was a good thing. A doctor who did abortions needed to be circumspect and safety-conscious; if he didn’t have a crowd of Jesus freaks out front it meant that he hadn’t pissed off the religious fanatics.

Yet.

I took my time, looking at the roof, the security cameras, the steel door. “Ricky didn’t say anything about needing an appointment.”

“Kind of odd for the doc not to be here.”

“He doesn’t keep night hours either.” I sighed. My mouth tasted sour even through the cinnamon Altoid Saul had given me. My hands were no longer shaking, but I still felt a little … unsteady.

I couldn’t believe something so callous had come out of my mouth.
To hell with dead whores. I’m going to hunt myself a Sorrow.

It was exactly the sort of thing a hellbreed would say. Or a Middle Way adept, one of those selfish bastards. I couldn’t
believe
myself.

“Christ.” I let out a sharp breath. “If I’m going to do any breaking and entering, I want it to be for a good cause. We’ll come back tomorrow. All the doc will be able to do anyway is confirm Baby Jewel wanted to get rid of a career impediment.” Shame twisted under the words as soon as I heard my own voice. “Christ, Saul. I can’t believe what I’m saying.”

His hand closed over my nape, warm and hard. Saul reeled me in as he leaned back against the wall of the alley we’d chosen for surveillance. “Relax, kitten.” He exhaled smoke over my head. “Just take a breath.”

I closed my eyes and leaned against him, my head cradled below his collarbone and shoulder. My cheek rested against his T-shirt, and I pushed his coat aside and breathed him in.

His thumb worked along the tense muscles at the back of my neck. He took another sharp breath in, inhaling the smoke, and blew it out. “She really got to you.”

“Mindfuck central.” I jagged in another breath.
God, Saul, what did I ever do without you?
But I knew. I worked myself into the ground and killed myself by inches, that’s what I did. Just like every other hunter. “They probably have a dossier on me a mile thick.”
And it doesn’t fucking help that I have to visit Lucado again. I hate pimps. Jesus Christ, but I hate pimps.
I shoved the thought away. It went without protest, used to being pushed under the rug. I was no longer vulnerable, I was a grown-up, kickass hunter, and I wasn’t going to forget it.

“What do you think the game is?”

“There’s a vanishing possibility she actually knows something.” My voice was muffled in his shirt. He was warm, warm as a Were, a higher metabolism radiating energy. “The trouble is, there’s nothing Chaldean that does this. The demons like to possess, not eat. And the Sorrows don’t
use
body parts. They like the whole person, bleeding and screaming. After they’ve mindfucked the hell out of them and torn them into little bits and slit their fucking throats and—”

“Jill.”

“What?”

“Shut up.”

I did.

“I need you calm, baby. Nice and calm. You start going off the deep end and your pheromones get all wacked-out, and that makes me
real
unhappy. ‘Kay?”

I nodded, my cheek moving against his shirt. He smelled of spice, woodsmoke, Charvil cherry tobacco, and familiar musk.
I don’t want to make Saul unhappy. That’s the last thing I want.

“‘Cause I like you nice and sweet, kitten.” His voice rumbled in his chest, not just the words but the sound soothing me. “I like you sleek and I like you purring. I don’t like no fucking Sorrow playing with your head, and we’ll fix it just as soon as we can. But for right now, baby, honey, kitten, Jilly-kiss, you need to calm the fuck down before I give you a
dose
of calm. Okay?”

“Okay.” I heard his heartbeat, even and unhurried. This was rapidly getting out of hand. “I’m calm.”

“No you’re not.” Amusement in his voice. “But close enough.”

“I could still use a dose.”
At least when you’re in bed with me I’m sure you’re not going to vanish.

That
thought vanished too, like bad gas in a mineshaft. I couldn’t afford to start on that particular mental path right now.

“Bet you could. Me too.” He moved a little, bumping me, I leaned into him. “Business before pleasure, baby.” His voice rumbled against my ear.

“Who made up that rule?”
I am handling this very, very well. All things considered.

“You did. Want to break it?”

Shit.
“We’d better get to Hutch’s. I’ve got books to hit before I have to face a few hours with a hellbreed.”

“You want dinner?” Christ, did Saul sound
tentative?
Why? I wasn’t going to break. I’d handled worse than this. The enemies I didn’t like were the ones that surprised me, that’s all. Once I knew they were in town, it became a clear-cut problem: seek and destroy.

Knowledge is the hunter’s best friend,
Mikhail always used to say.

Oh but it hurt to think of Mikhail. Hurt down deep, in a place I shut off from the rest of my life, the place that only bloomed when I was up alone at night with the wind mouthing the corners of the warehouse, low-moaning its song of streetcorners and loneliness. A place that hadn’t shown up too often since Saul had waltzed into my life and first irritated the hell out of me, then worked his way inside my defenses and ended up twined around my heart. Worked in so deep I wasn’t sure where he ended and I began.

The trouble with love is that it leaves you so fucking vulnerable. It’s a weak spot. But without that weak spot, what the ever-living fuck is a hunter fighting for?

“No.” I stepped reluctantly away from the shelter of his warmth. “I’d better not. Hanging around him tends to upset my stomach.” I sighed, rolling my tense shoulders, and blew out a long breath. “Feel free, though. You can hit the stands for a burrito or something while I’m in Hutch’s.”

“You think I’m going to leave you alone in the bookstore with Hutch?” His eyebrow rose, and the world suddenly jolted back into its familiar configurations. “I know how hot he thinks you are.”

Hutch’s was a bust. Hutch hadn’t had time to do more than pull the sources he thought were most likely and skim for translatable passages. The term
chutsharak
didn’t appear to mean anything at all. Hutch himself turned white when he saw me, showed us into the back room, then closed down and hightailed it. Which meant we spent the better part of the day into the night poking through moldering books and not finding much that I didn’t already know about the Sorrows.

He
also
hadn’t managed to find anything on Saint Anthony’s spear. Which meant that either Hutch was slipping—or Rourke had lied to me.

Guess which one my money was laid on.

When the time came, Saul drove—my hands were a little shaky. Our first stop was Mary of the Immaculate Conception, and I spent twenty minutes in a back pew with my eyes closed, smelling the peculiar odor of a church. Incense, vestments, ritual wine, the dash of hope, belief, terror, pleading. A familiar mix, comforting and spurring in equal measure.

The beads of the tiger-eye rosary slipped through my fingers as I sat, swaying slightly, the prayer repeating itself inside my head.

Thou Who hast given me to fight evil, protect me. Keep me from harm. Grant me strength in battle, honor in living, and a quick clean death when my time comes. Cover me with Thy shield, and with my sword may Thy righteousness be brought to earth, to keep Thy children safe. Let me be the defense of the weak and the protector of the innocent, the righter of wrongs and the giver of charity. In Thy name and with Thy blessing, I go forth to cleanse the night.

It is the Hunter’s Prayer. Several different versions are extant: Mikhail used to pray in gutter Russian, singing the words with alien grace; I’ve heard it intoned in flamenco-accented Spanish and spoken severely in Latin, I’ve heard the greased wheels of German clicking and sliding, I’ve even heard it chanted in Swedish and crooned in Greek, spoken sonorously in Korean and sworn languidly in French, and once, memorably, spat in Nahuatl from a Mexican
vaduienne
while cordite filled the air and the snarls of hellbreed echoed around us on every side. Me, I say it in English, giving each word its own particular weight. It comforts me.

Faint comfort, maybe, that hunters all over the word had just said or were about to say this prayer at any particular time. Faint comfort that I was part of a chain stretching back to the very first hunters of recorded history, the sacred whores of Inanna who used the most ancient of magics—that of the body itself, with the magic of steel—to drive the nightside out beyond the city walls. The priestesses were themselves heirs to the naked female shamans of Paleolithic times; those who used menstrual blood, herbs, bronze, and the power of their belief to set the boundaries of their camps and settlements, codifying and solidifying the theories of attraction and repulsion forming the basis of all great hunter sorceries. They had been the first, those women who traced ley lines in dew-soaked grasses, drawing on the power of the earth itself to push back Hell’s borders and make the world safe for regular people.

Faint goddamn comfort, yes. But I’d take it. Each woman in that chain had added something, each man who had sacrificed his life to keep the innocent safe had added something, and all uttered some form of this prayer.
God help me, for I go forth into darkness to fight. Be my strength, for I am doing what I can.

When I was finished I genuflected, candles shimmering on the altar; an old woman eyed me curiously as I dipped both hands in the holy water. She looked faintly shocked when I smoothed the water on my hair and the shoulders of my ragged coat, wiping two slashes of the cool blessed water on my cheekbones like Saul’s war-paint. I genuflected to the altar one last time, winked at the old woman, and met Saul in the foyer, where he was absorbed in staring at the stained-glass treatment of the Magdalene welcoming repentant sinners with open arms over the door. He dangled the obsidian arrowhead on its braided leather absently in his sensitive fingers, turning it over and over, smoothing the bits of hair and feathers.

He said nothing, and drove the speed limit all the way out to the familiar broken pavement of the industrial district, where the Monde Nuit crouched in its bruised pool of etheric stagnation.

He pulled up into the fire-zone, reached over, took my hand. Squeezed my fingers,
hard.
Let go, a centimeter at a time. Another ritual.

He would come into the Monde with me if he could. But a Were in a hellbreed bar like this would only spell trouble, and something told me Perry would love to have Saul on his territory.

That’s exactly the wrong thing to think at a time like this, Jill.
I stared out through the windshield. The long low front of the Monde beckoned, its arched doorway glowing with golden light. One hell of a false beacon.

“Stay here until I come get you, kitten. Okay?” If the words stuck in his throat, he didn’t show it.

I nodded. The scar on my wrist was hard, hot, and hurtful, a reminder that Perry expected me. A reminder I did most emphatically
not
need. The silver charms in my hair tinkled uneasily.

“He doesn’t own you.” Now Saul’s voice was thick. “He
doesn’t.
”

“I know.” I barely recognized my own whisper. “He doesn’t own me. You do.”
You’re the only man other than Mikhail who has ever
owned
me, Saul. You mean you don’t know that?

“Christ, Jill—”

But I had the door open and was out, the chill of a winter night folding around me. I walked to the door, my bootheels clicking on the concrete; there was a line as usual. Hellbreed and others stared at me, whispering, I reached the door. The bouncers eyed me, the same twin mountains of muscle, their eyes normal except for red sparks glittering in their pupils.

Please,
I prayed.
Let it be one of the nights he’s bored with me. Let him have other business.

Fat fucking chance. Last night he’d actually left the Monde Nuit and expended serious effort on me. Tonight I was probably going to pay for that.

Probably? Yeah. Like I was probably breathing right now.

I stalked between the bouncers, daring them to say anything; if they turned me away I could go back to the car and blame it on his own fucking security. But no, they didn’t make a single move. In fact, one of them grinned at me, and the thumping cacophony of the music inside reached out, dragged me into the womblike dark pierced with scattered lights, the smell of hellbreed, and the jostling crowd of the nightside come out to have a little fun. The ruby at my throat warmed, and Saul’s hickey pulsed.

Was it shameful of me to hope Perry wouldn’t notice it?

I kept my chin up and a confident swing to my hips as I stalked for the bar. Riverson was on duty again, and his blind eyes widened. He immediately reached for the bottle of vodka.

Not a good sign.

I reached the bar, and he poured a shot for me, slammed it down. “You’re supposed to go straight up,” he shouted over the noise. “He’s waiting for you.”

I winced inwardly. Outwardly, I gave Riverson a smile, picked up the shot, and poured it down. It burned. “Not like you to give free drinks, blind man. But I guess my tab’s still good.”

His mouth pulled down, sourly. His filmy eyes flicked past me, evaluated the dance floor. There was very little he didn’t notice. It used to be that a visit to the Monde would be during daylight, to visit Riverson and hear what he had to say, coming in as a hunter’s apprentice and watching Mikhail’s back. He’d never liked coming in here, even during the day. It was a very last resort, and one he hadn’t had to use too often.