Redemption Alley

Maddeningly, it didn’t seem quite right. I was too busy to tease out why just yet.

The small clearing was full of Weres, and lambent eyes turned to me as soon as I brushed past an anonymous trashwood bush and into full view. They were too polite to ask what the hell had happened, and sadly it’s more common than not to see me when I’ve just been through the wringer.

Hunting is a messy business.

“Trackers are on it,” a lean tall woman said. Lioness from the look of her, she had the characteristic broad face and sleek arms, muscle moving supple under honey skin. “Not too far from here, zeroing in on a couple blocks.”

“We’re burning daylight.” A slim young male, barely past puberty if you could believe his ski

“Patience, Rubio.” Theron’s entire face wrinkled into a snarl of a grin, smoothed out.

“It’s not a virtue,” the lioness added. “It’s a survival tactic.”

That caused a ripple of laughter, and the kid laughed too. It wasn’t the type of nervous laughter you get in an autopsy room, but its intent was the same. To bleed off a little steam, make the waiting palatable.

I set my back against the bole of a cottonwood and closed my eyes. My heart was thumping a little harder than I liked. A rebuilt heart, shattered by a bullet less than half an hour ago. Good thing I was a domestic model, maybe they had a hard time getting import parts for a ticker.

Get it, Jill? Arf arf. You’re a regular comic. Should go on the circuit.

Now think about something useful. What the hell is going on here? A blue Buick, Theron had said, speeding away down Macano Street. Nothing but shell casings left on the roof, some of them jingling in my coat pocket. And a smell. Male, Theron had said, human, and sweating. But a professional, to pump me full of lead and get the hell out of there.

Or very lucky.

Why? If I knew the why I’d know the who, wouldn’t I.

Pure lead bullets and a professional hit. My life was certainly never boring.

The air pressure changed and my eyes snapped open. Every Were in the clearing was standing poised and looking in the same direction, the same way a flock of birds will wheel with tremendous in-flight precision. As if by prearranged signal they broke, some ru

No muss, no fuss. The trackers had found something, and communicated in that way Weres sometimes have, through instinct, pheromones, or just sheer air.

No more time for thinking. The hunt was underway.

Chapter Ten

Ru

I know almost every hollow and corner of my city, and it’s that knowledge that lets me keep up. Even hellbreed speed has a hard time when it comes to Weres in full asshaul mode. They run like quicksilver, not like the hellbreed’s habit of blinking through space too fast for mortal eyes.

Pounding feet, exhilaration, the heat of the day shimmering off pavement, alleys and fire escapes flashing past, we swept through the industrial district in a tide of half-seen shapes. Most hunts are run at night, when there’s less chance of normals out on the street.

When there’s a scurf infestation, the Weres run by day. They use that little don’t look here trick they’re so fond of, the same trick animals use for camouflage. It’s more of a blending-in, really, but it makes the eye slide right over them.

Me? I rely on sheer outrageousness. People don’t want to see violations of the laws of physics. They don’t want to see anything un-ordinary. Their brains will convince them their eyes aren’t telling the truth. It’s part of what makes eyewitness testimony so tricksy. Given enough time, people will talk themselves out of seeing just about anything—if they’re lucky enough to survive seeing it, that is.

And if they’re lucky enough not to crack under the strain.

So we ran, me skipping and skidding, not as graceful as the Weres but just as fast, until they coalesced around me and there was a pause, my ribs heaving, silver shifting and chiming in my hair as I took a deep breath and peered off the roof of a dilapidated trucker’s depot right on the river’s edge.

“Goddammit,” I breathed. I’d’ve suspected someone’s nose was off, but hunting scurf is a Were specialty. “Near the water?”

“Fu

“Not in summer.” My coat flapped as I shrugged. “It’ll be a regular tinderbox in there.”

“I hate getting sweaty.” He actually delivered the line with a straight face, too, damn him. “Whenever you’re ready, Jill.”

I don’t think you can ever be ready for this, Theron. “Let’s not burn any more sunshine.” My fingers tingled, aching for a gun, and my mouth turned dry and slick again.

Chapter Eleven

It wasn’t just a nest. It was a full-blown nightmare.

Coughing howls, barks, growls and the exploding sweetsick smell everywhere, sinking into hair and clothes and even the boards of the decrepit building. No time for thought, only motion, because I’d popped the hatch on the roof and dropped straight down into a pile of scurf, Weres suddenly swarming through the boarded-up windows and kicked-in doors, more tearing off the HVAC vents on the roof and boards from the windows, letting in sword-shafts of sunlight as the scurf began screaming their keening glassine cries.

Theron landed lightly, half-changed, the cat in him overcoming the man as he dropped. They are creatures of power and grace, and no matter where on the continuum between human and animal they are they still express the best of either. His claws sprang free, the cat rising to the fore like smoke, and he unzipped the scurf leaping for me in one graceful motion. I spattered bullets through it, missing him by a miracle of reflex, and clocked a scurf on the head with the butt of my pistol. Another Were leapt with a spitting snarl, colliding with the scurf and knocking it away.

Most fights, a hunter takes point and the Weres watch her back. Facing down a rogue Were or scurf reverses that—a hunter is there to coordinate, to provide a leader who doesn’t have to function by consensus, and to clean up any problems with the authorities afterward.

In the middle of a fight with scurf—especially full-blown scurf with cartilaginous bones, powdery-slime acid coating, and active viral agents in their saliva and coating, even in their exhalation and pheromone wash—you want Weres. Because they do not hesitate, and they are largely immune to the viral agents, their systems peculiarly antithetical to scurf infection.

It mostly falls to a hunter to give the coup de grâce, and keep out of the way otherwise. It’s only a little harder than it sounds.

The smell coated everything. Cloying burnt sugar and illness, like the breath of a dying child given a lollipop. And there were so many of them—fifty at least, drifts of them jammed into corners, wedged between boxes, waking to find Death moving among them with fangs and fur, claws and lambent eyes.

That was the first wrongness. There should not have been so many. People go missing all the time, it’s true, it’s a fucking epidemic, but a nest this big should have made a huge pattern of disturbance.