Redemption Alley

“Don’t worry about that, Monty. Worry about keeping out of this. Don’t go anywhere alone. Be careful. And for God’s sake don’t tell anyone I’m still alive.”

“That’s going to be rough. What if someone else shows up missing on the east side?”

That’s more likely than you can possibly know. I wish we knew we’d gotten all the scurf. “Don’t worry about me doing my job. You just keep yourself out of trouble.” The car rolled to a stop, I hit the door, and was gone before he could even curse at me. I watched his taillights vanish from the roof of a convenient apartment building and hoped like hell he wouldn’t do anything silly.

Theron was waiting in the darkened doorway of a bakery, doing the little Were camouflage trick. If my blue eye hadn’t been able to look under the surface of the world, I would have had to depend on the thin thread of wrong touching my nerves, and really looked to see him. I also would have had a gun out while I did it.

Theron’s eyes fired orange in the gloom, like and unlike the streetlamps. “Is he clean?”

“Squeaky.” Or if he isn’t, I haven’t given him anything to go on other than I’m alive—and if word gets out I’m still breathing, I’ll know where it came from. “He suspected something was wrong, that’s all. Intuition still happens.”

The Were shrugged. My back prickled—other Weres were still out ru

Yet.

And I’d lost a full day.

It was enough to turn anyone into a pessimist.

“What next?” He moved restlessly.

“You stop by Galina’s and pick up some ammo for me, drop by the barrio and squeeze your gang friends for the word on why a cop would want me dead, and I’m going home to change clothes.”

Predictably, he decided to argue. “Like I’m going to let you out of my sight.”

This isn’t negotiable. I need a few minutes to myself and some hard thinking. “Everyone thinks I’m dead, Theron. There aren’t many cops who know the amount of damage I can really take, or what it would take to kill me. Nobody is going to be looking for me just yet. Besides, the longer you wait to go talk to your friends in the barrio, the more chance they’ll ‘forget’ something.” If you were Saul we wouldn’t be having this conversation; you’d be doing what I told you. Goddammit. I rolled my shoulders in their sockets, a habitual movement easing muscle strain.

“I don’t like it. I promised Saul I’d look out for you.”

“I’m just going home, Theron. I promise not to talk to strangers and to look both ways before crossing the street.” I stepped out of the doorway, smoke taunting my nose. It drifted up from my coat, the smell of burning vinyl, cooked leather, and gasoline.

What a reek. I’m never going to be able to wash it out.

The Were shrugged. “You’d better,” he muttered darkly, before easing out of the shadows himself and taking a few steps in the opposite direction. Then he gathered himself and blurred, ru

I strangled the urge to get the last word in. It would take me about a half-hour to get home, longer if I had to wait for a cab. I might as well use my own share of preternatural speed.

What I hadn’t said hung in the air. Hunters depend on the police, they are our eyes and ears. What we do is law enforcement, in its strictest sense. And as Carp had pointed out, we didn’t have some of the restrictions ordinary cops had. No hunter was ever hauled into court.

When you couldn’t depend on your backup, where did that leave you? Fucked was the only term that applied. And until I knew more about who was trying to do me in, I couldn’t even answer my pager. If someone else went missing or a new case popped up…

Then you’d better finish this quickly, Jill. Start thinking about how you’re going to do just that.

Chapter Seventeen

I hate having guests. Especially uninvited guests.

And most definitely, especially, uninvited guests who barely wait until I’m through the door before they try to kill me.

Word of advice: If you are looking to catch a hunter by surprise, don’t do it in her house, for Chrissake. Any place a hunter sleeps is likely to be well-defended, and if it’s easy to break in you should be wondering how hard it’s going to be to escape. A hunter does not sleep somewhere without knowing every crack and creak in the walls—which includes knowing when some sloppy-ass hellbreed has slithered through a window and is breathing heavily behind your door.

So I was ready when I stepped through and dropped down into a crouch. The dirty-blond ’breed hesitated, flew over my head and smacked himself a good one on the jamb. Wood splintered and I drove upward with the knife, the silver laid along the blade hissing with bluespark flame as it met Hell-tainted flesh.

The ’breed twisted on himself in midair with that gut-loosening spooky agility they all have. The hardest thing to get used to is how they move, in ways human joints can’t and human muscles never would. I spun a full one-eighty, bootsole scraping the linoleum just inside the door, and went down flat on my back in the entry hall.

Come to Mama, you stupid fuck. The bleeding ’breed didn’t disappoint, dropping down with claws outstretched, face twisted into a gri

I spend half my fighting life on the floor. Judo’s not just fun, it’s a lifesaver. Once you ground a ’breed or, say, a Possessor, their advantage in speed is gone and their edge in strength is halved if you know anything about leverage. But I had no intention of wriggling around with this jerkwad.

No, I shot him four times, punching through the shell of hellbreed skin, and flicked a boot up to catch his wounded belly, deflecting his leap by a few critical degrees so he sailed over me and splatted, screaming like a banshee, onto the hardwood floor.

I was on my feet again in a trice, knife dropped chiming to the floor, kicked away so the ’breed couldn’t reach it, and my fingers closing around the bullwhip’s handle. A quick jerk, a flick of my wrist, and braided leather snapped through the air, the tiny sharp bits of silvery metal tied on the end of the whip breaking the sound barrier and scoring hellbreed flesh.

This is why hunters use whips. It gives us reach we otherwise wouldn’t have. I was already pulling the trigger, firing twice more, the reports booming and echoing through my silent house. I was only a half-inch off on the right shoulder, but my first shot took him right through the ball-joint of the left. That took some of the pep out of my unwanted visitor—but not all of it.

The whip flickered again, like a snake’s tongue weighted with razorblades. It tore across the ’breed’s face, and by now I’m sure both of us had figured out I wanted him taken alive.

I wanted answers.

He still put up a fight, but when I broke his left arm in three places and got him down on the floor, the silver-loaded blade of another knife to his throat, the squealing from him took on an animal sound I was more than familiar with.

I didn’t recognize this chalk-ski

Once the hard shell is broken, the bad in a hellbreed leaks out. Once that shell is breached with silver, an allergic reaction sets in too. The blade ran with blue sparks, reacting to the brackish foulness of Hell the scarecrow exhaled. He wore a black silk button-down and designer jeans, but his battered, horn-callused feet were bare, the toes too flexible to be human and graced with curling yellow nails.