Hunter's Prayer (18 page)

“Destroyer of babies. Eater of worlds. He-Who-Rewards—”

“Shut up, Hutch.”
I know the titles.
I swallowed dryly. “Listen to me. Leave the bookstore right now. Go over to Galina’s. Stay there until I come get you. Take the Luvrienne and de Ferrar with you, I might call there. Okay?”

“Oh, God,” he moaned. “What have you gotten me into now?”

“I haven’t gotten you into anything, stupid. I just want you safe. Better safe than eviscerated. Get my drift?”

“Oh, shit, Jill. I hate you.”

“Galina will be glad to see you.”

“You bitch.” But I heard more paper rustle, and knew he was getting ready to do as I asked. “Okay. I’m on my way. I’ll leave everything locked. If you come in, try not to burn the place down, okay?”

“Hutch!” For once, I sounded scandalized. “I wouldn’t ever burn down a
bookstore.
Jeez, what kind of hunter do you think I am?”

“One who’s made it her personal mission to get me into trouble. Bye, Jilly.”

“Don’t call me that.” I hung up and stared at my bedroom phone, feeling my forehead pucker.
Holy fuck. The Nameless. Why would a Sorrow break away from her House and do an evocation? It makes no sense.

Well, there was one person who could explain it. The catch, of course, was if I could trust her explanation.

Saul was silent. He stood by the window, sunlight touching his hair, making the silver sparkle and bringing out the richness of his skin. He had his hands in his jeans pockets, the black
Cazotte Lives
T-shirt strained at his shoulders. The tiny bottle of holy water on its silver chain at his chest glittered, throwing darts of hard light from the glass.

All right, Jill.
I looked at the fall of sunlight against his hair.
Think. What pattern do we have here? Having a pattern is the first step.

If what I was suspecting was really going down, why hadn’t there been bodies showing up earlier? Or if there
were
bodies, where were they now?

That isn’t a very comfortable line of thought.

I didn’t have enough pieces of the puzzle to make a pattern I was happy with logic-wise. Once Saul told me what the arrowhead was, I would have a little more. Hopefully.

And the thing, the clawed and furred thing that I couldn’t quite get a mental picture of no matter how hard I concentrated … what did that have to do with it? Was it a piece of Chaldean sorcery I hadn’t seen before? It wasn’t exactly likely, given the study of the Sorrows I’d done. But was the furry thing the
chutsharak?
If it was, and Belisa and the younger Sorrow were fleeing it—

No, that didn’t make any sense. Was the furry stinky thing unrelated to the murders? But no, its smell was gagging-strong over the scenes.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re related. Does it?

I coiled the bullwhip at my side, checked my guns, my knives, and shrugged into my coat. I caught a fading whiff of iron, pre-Atlantean bloodlust, and furry stink on the tattered leather. “Saul?”

“Yeah?” He looked away from the window.

“It’s time. You can tell me what that thing is.”

“Come on out into the kitchen first.”

“Why?”

“You need breakfast, and Perry’s here.”

Jesus Christ.
“
What?
He’s still here?”

His dark eyes were fathomless. “Of course he’s still here. He’s patched up the windows and everything, he thinks he should shadow you until this is over. I happen to agree.”

“What?” My jaw threatened to drop completely. The charms tinkled in my hair, and my palms itched with the memory of a slender piece of steel, reverberating with bloodlust. “He left the Monde Nuit and he’s in our
kitchen
and you want him to
stay there?
”

He shrugged. “I want him to stick around. You’re safer with both of us looking after you.”

“Saul—”

He held up the arrowhead. “I found out what this means, kitten. And believe me, you don’t want
any
of it.”

“Well, spill it.”

“Come on into the kitchen and I will. I’ll make you breakfast, and we’ll strategize.” He was utterly serious.

I held up both hands, Mikhail’s ring glittering in the thin hard sunlight. “Wait just a goddamn minute. You don’t like it when I visit him, whether to track down a hellbreed or pay my dues for the bargain I made. What the hell are you doing playing pattycake with him now?”

“If he’s going to help get your stubborn ass through this in one piece I don’t care.” Saul folded his arms, muscle sliding under the T-shirt’s thin cotton. “This is
bad,
Kiss. As bad as you think it is, it’s worse.”

My heart was doing something strange, pounding so hard I felt faint. I didn’t like the thought of Perry in my
house.
The thought of something so bad Saul didn’t care if Perry was running around unchaperoned inside the warehouse was even worse. “Why? What
is
that thing?”

“Come out, have some breakfast, and I’ll tell you. Then you can decide what you’re going to do.”

In the end I gave up. Saul had a good reason for anything he asked me to do, and I trusted him. But for Chrissake, something so bad he wanted Perry around as backup… .

It was enough to give even a seasoned hunter the willies.

19

S
aul set the plate down in front of me. “Eat.”

I eyed it. Eggs, pancakes, bacon, more coffee, an English muffin. Another plate of eggs with hollandaise, and a peach, cut up carefully and decoratively. Nothing experimental, and nothing fancy. For Saul, this was the culinary equivalent of a polite non-answer to a question that hadn’t even been asked.

Perry hunched on the stool at the end of the kitchen counter, his gray suit sharply and immaculately creased. He seemed not to like the sunlight falling through the windows, and I was secretly glad. For all that, his hair glowed and his eyes burned blue, and the warehouse—while smelling of hellbreed—was neat and repaired, the ice gone, every inch of glass swept up and new panes put in, the wood fused back together, shattered furniture either patched up or replaced. It was a massive expenditure of cash and sorcerous power, and one I wasn’t quite sure I liked the thought of incurring.

I finished examining my plate and glanced at Perry, who snickered into his coffee cup. “Don’t worry, Kiss. Saul and I negotiated terms. This doesn’t enter into our bargain.”

“Is that so.” I tried not to look relieved; tried also not to feel a little wriggle of panic that he had guessed what I was thinking. Picked up a piece of bacon, crunched it between my teeth. “Well? Care to clue me in, Saul?”

He leaned against the counter on the other side, and I realized he was keeping Perry in the corner of his eye. “I found out what our hairy little friend is.” Saul poured himself a glass of orange juice. “You want the bad news or the bad news first?”

“Just tell me
something.
I’m getting impatient.” I tucked in with a will, finding I was indeed hungry and my stomach would, indeed, accept nourishment. Hallelujah.

Perry snickered again.

Saul didn’t even glance at him. “It’s a wendigo.”

I choked on a bite of pancake. “Urf? Mrph murfr
mrph!
”

“They’re not myths. I wish to Christ they were.” Saul had actually paled. “I had to take the arrowhead to a Moonspeaker in the barrio, an old one. She’d seen a wendigo before and remembered the smell. She said it was a
hund’ai,
part of a fetish meant to control or create a wendigo. The sight of it turned her into a sobbing heap and her mate nearly had my liver and lights for upsetting her. I ended up at a little bar with a werespider; she’d actually hunted a wendigo up Canada way. She started to shake while she talked about it.” Saul’s tone was dead level. His eyes were as dark and serious as I’d ever seen them.

I glanced at Perry. He stared into the coffee cup, his face arranged in a mask of bland interest. All the same, he looked miserable. My blue eye twinged a little, I could see the edges of his aura fringing a little bit, wearing down.

Maybe our favorite hellbreed didn’t like being out during the day. I was suddenly immensely cheered by the thought. Inside his jacket, pants, and open-collared crisp white shirt he looked almost normal, and profoundly uncomfortable.

Don’t fall for that, sweetheart. It’s just another dirty little facade. If Saul wasn’t here we’d see a different Perry indeed.

“Wendigo.” I crunched on another bit of bacon. “A flesh-eating spirit, with its lips and nose frozen off. Come on, Saul.”

“Jillian, if you don’t cut the crap, I’m going to take your breakfast back and drag you into the sparring room. And make you wash the goddamn blood off the goddamn sheets, too. Look at your
coat.
This is no fucking laughing matter.” Even, chill, cold. Saul had never spoken to me like this before. “A wendigo is something else. It’s a spirit made mad by neglect and violence, a spirit that has done what is
taboo
—tasted human flesh, developed a craving for it.”

A craving for human flesh and black-market organs. Why is this fitting together far too neatly for my comfort?
And the unearthly, deadly icy chill of the thing rose briefly in memory. I shivered again. “A Were spirit? That thing wasn’t a Were. I know Weres.”

“It’s not Were, it’s a
spirit
we know about. Totally different kettle of fish.” Saul folded his arms. “Some of the legends say they’re maybe Weres dying without burial rites, or a Were who was
taboo
in life. I don’t know. The legends are confused. It’s not like hunting scurf. Weres
know
scurf. These things … humans might get confused about them, but whatever they are, they’re not Were.”

“Jesus.” I was having a little trouble with this. The
last
thing we needed was it getting out that the Were had anything to do with something like this. This thing was as unlike Weres as… . My brain failed, trying to come up with the simile. But a non-hunter, even one with some nightside experience, wouldn’t understand that. Hell, plenty of nightsiders with grudges against the furkind wouldn’t understand it either.

Perry finally weighed in, as if he couldn’t help himself. “Really, dear Kiss, you should listen to furball here. He knows more than you think. After all, he didn’t go into the barrio to seek facts. He went to confirm.”

My fork paused halfway to my mouth, and I looked up at Saul. His mouth had drawn down bitterly, and he pushed his hair back with one hand. But his other hand was on the counter, and his knuckles were white.

What, did Saul think a transparent little ploy like that would work on me? How far inside my head did he think Pericles had wormed his little hellbreed way?

However far Saul thinks he has, he’s probably gotten in further. Last night proved that, didn’t it?
“You suspected it?” I felt like an idiot with my fork in the air, I set it down gently, carefully, on the cobalt-blue counter. “Saul?”

“I didn’t know.” He picked up his juice again, took a sip, his eyes not leaving mine. But I got the idea that if he could have, he would have darted a venomous look at Perry. “Until I knew for sure, I didn’t want to open my mouth and muddy the trail.”

I nodded. Looked down at my plate. “Well, that’s why you’re my partner.”
Nice try, Perry. But no dice.
“So you’re absolutely satisfied that this thing is a wendigo?”

He nodded. The silver in his hair tinkled, and his dark eyes lost their hardness and for a moment were lambent orange, a Were’s hunting glow. “I’d bet my life on it.”

“It’s not your life we’ll be betting, it’s mine.” I stared down at my plate, forced my fingers to curl around the fork again. “Whatever it is, I’m taking it down. What kills a wendigo?”

Saul sighed, heavily. “I don’t know yet. The legends are … confused. The werespider was part of a team that tracked one of those things for fifteen weeks, through a few snowstorms, and finally killed it by driving off the edge of a crevasse and dynamiting a mountainside down on it. The creature and the dynamiting combined to knock out most of her team.”

“How many?” Werespiders aren’t known for being pack animals; like werecats they tend to be independent, loosely affiliated in tribes rather than in pack-groups. Except werelions, of course. Always excepting werelions. Some bird Weres were highly social, and most of the canine Weres except the occasional albino shaman. Then there were the
khprum
and the scorpiani, who some sources said weren’t Weres at all, not to mention the kentauri and the wererats, who are highly social and stratified to a fault. The wererats, incidentally, are the closest in physiology and outlook to humans.

Nobody but me usually sees the humor in that.

“Fourteen in the team. The spider and a wereleopard made it back. The wereleopard died of matesickness two months after; his mate was lost in the dynamiting. If they hadn’t been out in the middle of nowhere the casualties might’ve been higher. Humans and such.”

Crap.
I mulled this over, tapping my fingertips on the countertop. In an urban setting, this didn’t bode well. “An evocation in four days. Bodies being dumped, clean of organs… . Saul, where are the autopsy files? I wonder how much other body mass was lost. Muscle, specifically.”

“Belly muscle was gone on the ones we saw. Some bites on the thighs and the arms, too.” He edged down the counter to a stack of file folders. “But Rocadero wasn’t found with his organs gone.”

I snorted. “Given his proclivities, I’m not sure his own side didn’t murder him.” I was chewing on more egg when a terrible idea hit me. “One of the traditional evocations of the Nameless is done with perfect-tallow candles. Victims’ omentums would be perfect for that. All you’d need is a place to render it down.” My gorge rose; I swallowed it and took a gulp of coffee. “Ugh. This is going to be a messy one. How about Rocadero gets sliced because he’s no longer useful?”

“How so?” He slid the folders down to me. Perry had subsided, but I get the feeling he was only biding his time. Some essential quality of scariness had drained away from him in my sunny kitchen, Saul’s territory in the middle of my house, and I was grateful for that.

But not grateful enough to relax. Or to think he was finished yet. “Let me pass this theory by you. A Sorrow escapes, she decides for whatever reason that she’s feeling a little apocalyptic. She starts laying her plans and moves into Santa Luz, finds a Mob man, and starts supplying him with black-market organs, taking a healthy cut to fund her dreams of world domination. She gets the organs out with the help of a trained doctor—our friend Kricekwesz. Then she throws whatever bits she doesn’t need to the wendigo, who sits in the van and snacks until she needs to get rid of an inconvenient hunter.” I buttered my English muffin, very pleased with myself. “Only why does she start dumping pregnant hookers?”

“Once-pregnant hookers,” Perry corrected, pedantically.

“They were still pregnant when they were killed.” I looked at him, hunching on the stool, and had a moment of dangerous pity. He looked miserable.

But even a miserable rattlesnake can kill.

“We don’t know that. They were visiting an abortionist.” He pronounced the word with no audible weight, just a slight emphasis on the last syllable that made it sound vaguely French.

Where do you come from, Perry?
“Thanks for putting my house back together,” I said suddenly. “Why did you follow me?”

“The cat wasn’t at the Monde to pick you up. I thought you might be in a state to harm yourself.”

Well, isn’t that decent of you.

Saul pushed the folders closer, hitting my elbow. Subtle of him, but I was glad of it anyway. “Fetal tissue?” he hazarded. “Valuable stuff, to the right buyer.”

I swallowed another wave of nausea.
Goddammit.
I needed the nutrition if I was going to stay on my feet and bounce back after using the staff. “Oh, yuck. That’s a wonderful thought to have with breakfast.”
Not to mention one I’ve been kicking around for a bit
.

“Troubled by a delicate stomach, my Kismet?” Perry was suddenly all solicitude. The oil in his voice reminded me of the terrible devouring spill of pleasure through my nerves, the mark on my wrist suddenly swollen-hot with his attention.

I closed my eyes, chewing the English muffin. Swallowed. “Our first stop is this Kricekwesz. If he’s not in his office I want to tear the goddamn place apart until we find something, anything. I want to get Carp and Rosie to start leaning on the organ trade in town. And I want to find Melisande Belisa. She knows something, and once we get our hands on her I want to make her squeal.” My eyes opened, met Perry’s. “You ever menaced a Sorrow before?”

Did I imagine it, or did a flicker of a snarl cross his face? “They don’t like hellbreed. With good reason.” He set his coffee cup on the counter. “If you will agree to stay in my sight until this matter is finished, I will agree to find this Sorrow and make her fit her name.”

“I thought your protection only extended so far.”

“That was before you were attacked in your own home, Kiss.” He slid off the stool, and I tensed. What was it about daylight that made him seem so bloody human? “All bets, as they say, are now off. I want to repair some of the holes in the walls. Call me if anything
interesting
happens.”

He glided away, and I sighed.
I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.

Saul muttered something unprintable. I silently agreed. “I don’t like this,” I said quietly. “So he shows up just in time, both times. I dragged Elizondo in on a slave-ring charge and he was in the Monde after we scorched that hole on North Lucado. And now this organ thing, and a wendigo. Saul, you’re
sure?
Absolutely sure?”

“Hundred percent.” He hunched his shoulders, his eyes on me. “The truly bad news is I don’t know if we can kill it. It’s a
spirit,
kitten. Hunger incarnate, hunger distilled. It’s taboo. Not a real physicality at all, now. Just … appetite. And ice.”

I took a long gulp of coffee that had cooled just enough to be reasonable. “It cut me.” The finality in my voice surprised me. “If it can cut, it can
be
cut. There’s nothing out there so bad it can’t be killed. Except for maybe a god, and we’re not facing one of those. Not for four days, at least. What can you tell me about wendigo? How they’re created, what can kill ‘em, that sort of thing?”

“Not much.” Saul straightened, looking relieved. “But I can get in touch with someone who knows more.”

“Good.” I turned my attention back to my plate. “This is good, Saul. You do a mean pancake.”

I didn’t look up, but I could feel his smile. “Glad you like it, kitten.”

Monty was going batshit.

“What the fuck are you telling me, Jill? Black-fucking-market organs? What the hell?” He stalked through his office as if expecting the perp to be hiding behind a stack of paper. “Why didn’t you
tell
me?”

If I’d known, Montaigne, I would have. Don’t get pissy.
“I had no idea organ heisting was part of it. I was looking for a supernatural explanation. It was the scalpel marks that clued me in.”

“Sullivan and the Badger have been tracking a string of black-market organ harvestings that end up leaving the donors dead with a .22 hole in their skull.” Monty’s tie was loose and his collar crumpled, he was working round the clock. It wasn’t good for him.