Redemption Alley

“Oh, you may have rope to hang yourself and to spare. Have no fear of that.” Perry took a gliding step away, and another, as if it was a dance. Chain-link rattled under his feet like metal bones. “Enough rope, and a noose as well. Goodnight, sweetheart.”

He all but vanished into the sudden darkness, the lights at the bend of the warehouses failing utterly, and there was a sound like pipe organs chuckling in some deep subterranean cavern while a madman pounded on the keys. I let out a long shaking breath, forcing my arms to come down and rest stiff at my sides, weighed down by the guns and their cargo of deadly silver.

“What. The fuck. Was that?” Leon spoke for both of us.

“I don’t know.” I sounded tired even to myself. “This does not look good.”

“Every time I see that motherfucker he looks like he just won the lottery.”

Just like any other hellbreed. “He can’t cash the check as long as I’m around, Leon.” My eyes dropped down to the quick-rotting ’breed on the floor. The stink had just officially gotten worse. Ru

I felt a momentary flash of guilt. It hadn’t been necessary to kill them, if Perry was telling the truth and he’d come here to help.

Get real, Jill. What kind of “help” do you think Perry’s going to offer you? Nothing you’d want to accept. You made the deal with him because Mikhail said it was a good idea, and now you’re sitting pretty.

As pretty as you can sit with a hellbreed mark on your wrist and Perry laughing at you. Cold fingers touched my spine as I stared at the collapsing face.

It was a relief it didn’t look human. Well, much.

You’re not thinking straight. Focus.

Just as I prepared to make another of those gut-clenching physical efforts to tear my mind out of a psychological dead end, I froze and tipped my head back, staring up at the fixtures slowly losing their dangling momentum.

“Jill?” Leon was getting to the edge of not-quite-frantic-but-definitely-uncomfortable. “I’d like to buy a fuckin’ vowel, please.”

Me too. But I think I just got one. “Shhh.” The thought circled, returned, and I leapt on it.

Irene’s voice floated through the cavern of my skull. The name on his credit card was Alfred Bernardino. Italian, greasy, built wide and hairy.

Echoing against it came Carp’s voice, from a few days and a wide shoal of darkness away. They won’t talk to me or to Bernie—his partner—but it doesn’t seem possible that one of them pulled the trigger on him.

Bernie, in Vice. Italian, built like a dockworker, with a foul mouth—always an asset in the Vice department—and stubby fingers always holding a filterless cigarette. Pedro Ayala’s partner.

The insight hit me in a flash of blinding white, the fluorescents overhead begi

“Holy shit,” I breathed. “Leon, I’m an idiot.”

He magnanimously refused to comment on that. “Can we get the fuck outta here now?”

“Sure thing. Let’s go back to Galina’s, I need to talk to Carp.”

Chapter Twenty-three

Dawn leached gray through the sky. Galina’s eyes were smudged with sleeplessness. “Thank God you’re here,” she greeted me. “Your detective’s all right, but that Trader—”

Oh, Jesus. What now? “Do I have to kill her?” I only sounded weary, which was a bad sign. Leon sighed, leaning against the door, and Galina handed him a cold can of Pabst.

That’s your local Sanc. On tap with whatever you need. Galina made a slight moue of distaste. “She’s up in the greenhouse, crying. Tried to get out, but you said you wanted her here. Something about Fairfax, and—”

“I can kill her,” Leon volunteered hopefully, popping the top and taking a slurp. The eyeliner turned his eyes into dark holes, and made the smudges of exhaustion under them deeper. “Put a real capper on my night.”

It’s not like a Trader to cry, unless there’s an advantage in it. Still, she saved Carp. Under threat of death, but still. I let out a sigh that was mostly weariness, with a soupçon of irritation thrown in. “Not yet.” Not tonight, at least. Or today, since it’s dawn. “Where’s Carp?”

“In bed. He’s sedated. I think he’ll be fine, if he can get over the nightmares.” Galina sighed, too. She really was a gentle soul.

It made me wonder sometimes. If I’d ever been a gentle soul, would my life have knocked it out of me? Would I have survived hunter training and the nights afterward if I’d had any gentleness left in me?

Stay with the here and now, Jill. “Can he talk?”

Galina shrugged, slipping her hands in the pockets of her gray knit hoodie. She looked like she could use a night or two of rest as well. “Depends on what you want to talk to him about. He’s not going to be doing quadratic equations, but he’s coherent.”

Upstairs, in the spare room over the shop, Carp lay still as death under a vintage yellow counterpane. He was cottage-cheese pale, his sandy hair a bird’s nest, and even though the blood had been washed off the wound on his head was glaring. He stared at me through the gray light spilling through windows humming with a Sanctuary’s powerful defenses, and I knew that look in his eyes.

Carper was now haunted. He’d seen the nightside up close. Not just the fragrance of difference that hung on a Were, not just the bodies left after a nightside eruption into the civilian world. He’d been in the nightclub for forty-five minutes or so—more than enough time for him to see up close what lurked under the fabric of reality.

They just wanted to play with him before Shen came down, Irene had said. God alone knew what game they had played. One that involved taking a bite out him, apparently.

I dragged a straight-backed chair over to the side of the bed. “Hey.” Even though I needed words out of him, needed them quickly, I spoke slowly, softly. “How are you?”

He managed a harsh little thread of a laugh. “Kismet.” It wasn’t an answer. “Jesus.”

“Just the former, Detective.” A little humor, to set him at ease.

Who was I kidding? No way was Carp going to be set at ease. He’d seen under the mask.

I decided to get down to it. I couldn’t make the shock any less, but I could at least get usable information out of him if he was coherent. “Bernardino, Alfie Bernardino. Ayala’s partner. What do you know about him, Carp?”

Still, even as I said it, I hated myself. He needed sedation and a therapist, not me digging around and reminding him of things he was probably goddamn eager to start forgetting.

He blinked. Made an internal effort, things shifting behind his eyes. “Ayala. His partner. Slippery fucker.”

Man, this just keeps getting better. “He’s in it up to his neck, and probably deeper. But then you know that, right?”

“Credit card statements about this waitress—Irene. She—” He coughed, weakly, his eyelids falling down. “Kiss, their eyes. Their eyes were glowing.”

They always do, Carp. I laid a hand against his forehead—my left hand, since the right was humming with fever-hot hellbreed-tainted force. “Just rest. It’ll fade.”

I was lying. Things like this don’t fade. They come back in nightmares and in waking dreams, flashbacks and stress disorders you need antidepressants for—or something stronger.

Something like a steel-cold barrel in the mouth, or the bottle in the hand, or pills you can’t get in the States. Something, anything, to make it go away so you can face the normal world.

Except sometimes you can’t.