Redemption Alley

“What have you gotten me into now?” But he went back to scribbling. “Okay, come on into the back room. Christ on a crutch, why did I ever take this job?”

“Because you thought it would be interesting, Hutch, and Mikhail saved you from being locked in a six-by-nine.” I really must have been feeling savage, because for once even mild-ma

“Oh, shut up. Get into the back room. I just got a new machine, best way to break it in.” He made little shooing motions with his hands, for all the world like a farmer’s wife herding chickens. “Come on, kids. Let’s go see what Uncle Hutch can dig up.”

It’s certainly something to see an underweight, glorified librarian poke and prod two fully trained and armed hunters around like a chicken herder. If I was less tired, I might even have been amused.

Hutch left about an hour later. I should have taken him to Galina’s, but there was precious little time. The next half-hour passed slowly, both Leon and I up to our eyeballs in reading material. He’d taken the Argoth references; I took Carp’s file and Bernardino’s stats as well as whatever Hutch could dig up on the airfield.

“We are looking at some serious shit,” Leon said quietly.

I glanced up from Carp’s file. “How bad?”

He tapped the thick, dust-choked leather-bound tome sitting open in front of him. “Bad enough that I’ve got the heebie-jeebies, darlin’.” Copper clinked in his hair, and he took a pull off the only beer Hutch had stocked—a brown-bottled microbrew Leon wrinkled his nose at but took down three of. “Says here that Argoth surfaced earlier than Hutch thought. First recorded instance of him is in 1918, something involving a batch of three hundred shell-shocked soldiers in a hospital ending up with a serious case of dead and half-eaten.”

“Charming.” I didn’t quite shudder, but it was close. “Any verification?”

“Some British hunter thinks it was him, anyway. Then he shows up in Germany in 1924. A couple of Alsatian hunters living in Munich ID’d him hanging around with an Austrian wa

I let out a slow whistle, air bleeding between my lips. Ugh. Nasty. “A talyn?” I hazarded. It certainly seemed likely. When they come out of Hell, they come hungry. And shell-shocked, vulnerable humans would be a nice snack.

“Could be. Sources ain’t specific enough. Went through the hunters in Germany like a hot knife through butter all the way through the war; the Allies had to bring in their own hunters attached to the armies just to stay afloat of all the nasty.” Leon’s mouth pulled down like he tasted something sour. He probably did.

I dimly remembered hearing about that time from my own training, one of the long sessions with my head on Mikhail’s chest and his fingers in my hair, his voice tracing through the history of what we know—and even more important, what we suspect. “Mikhail mentioned that.”

It was a bad time all around. Here in Santa Luz there had been the great demonic outbreak in ’29, and the few hunters remaining stateside during the war years had been overworked almost to death. The Weres suffered high casualties too, and pretty much the only thing that kept any kind of lid on the situation was the Sanctuaries letting hunters move into their houses and training halls, quietly taking sides even though they were supposed to be neutral.

Patriotism isn’t just for normals, you know.

Leon looked down at the page, tapped it with one blunt fingertip. “Says here Jack Karma—the second one, that crazy fucker—takes credit for killin’ him, in February of forty-five. In Dresden. That must’ve been a goddamn sight.”

“Jack Karma, huh?” I eyed the book speculatively. “He moved to Chicago after the war, didn’t he.”

“Think so.” Leon didn’t need to say any more.

I had Jack Karma’s apprentice ring, blackened and vibrating still from the incident that had killed him, tucked safely away in the warehouse on a leather thong with five other silver rings. Each one was a story, passed along the way family history is.

Mikhail hadn’t spoken much of his teacher, and I supposed it was normal—as normal as a hunter ever gets. Losing your teacher is much worse than losing a mother or a father. It’s almost as bad as losing an apprentice.

And I still could not think of Mikhail’s death without an ache in the middle of my chest. “Huh. So we don’t know exactly how high-up in the hierarchy this Argoth is. But Jack killed him or sent him back, right?”

“Probably just sent him back, if that blond ’breed is talkin’ him up now. Which means he’s worse news than a fuckin’ talyn. But there ain’t been anything in the news lately big enough to break anything big out of Hell. Not on this continent, anyway.” Leon sighed. “There ain’t nothin’ else of any use here. What you got?”

In other words, Perry could be leading us down the garden path. Even though I didn’t think it was very likely. Still, first things first. “A whole pile of not very much,” I admitted. “Carp’s right. The file’s a bunch of dead ends. There’s only initials in witness statements, and witnesses have a habit of disappearing. Want to bet they all ended up as scurf chow?”

“Now why do you want to take an old man’s money, darlin’?” Leon rolled his shoulders in their sockets, easing tension, and pushed the book away, leaning back in his chair and eyeing me.

“There’s one common note in here—someone high up in the police structure, identified only as H. Pedro Ayala told Carp that he knew who H was, that it was bigger than Carp thought, and suspected wiretapping so bad he wouldn’t even talk on a pay phone. Then he ended up dead.” And I still have to find time to find out who took him down. Christ. “Sullivan and the Badger had four different leads who referred to a big-time cop as ringleader, but all four of them petered out, mostly with the people giving the leads disappearing.”

“There’s an almighty big mass grave out somewheres, then.”

And a cop so dirty he makes Perry look almost clean. I swallowed hard. “Not if it’s scurf-related. Listen to this. Twelve murders of illegal immigrants, organs stripped. Then everything stops—just when that Sorrows bitch moved in last year. Want to bet this little organ ring came to the attention of someone on the nightside once the Sorrows started putting their fingers in?” I cocked an ear, listening. Traffic on the streets outside. The shop was dead quiet. All was as it should be, hot sunlight trickling away with every moment we spent in here. Prickles of sweat touched the curve of my lower back even through the air-conditioning. Last year had been bad in more ways than one.

And somewhere out there in the world was Melisande Belisa, the Sorrow who had killed my teacher. Free as a bird, again.

Get it together, Jill. Belisa’s not your problem right now. Scurf are your problem, and whoever is killing your people is your problem. Even Argoth isn’t a problem—yet. Prioritize.

I took a deep breath laden with the smell of paper and dusty knowledge. Forced myself to pull it together.

“Huh.” Leon thought it over. He sneezed twice, lightly. Took another swallow of beer.

It felt good to say it out loud, to string the events together. It’s always handy to have someone else to bounce things off. “The scurf we’ve found have all been too old. If they’re escapees from that warehouse on Cherry, they’re communally sharing kills. Which means the disappearances we’ve had fit a pattern. If you dropped a mature nest in the middle of a populated area you’d have exactly the sort of disappearances I’ve been seeing lately.”

“So it’s a pattern.” He nodded. “Good fuckin’ deal.”

“Amen to that.” If it was a pattern, it could be anticipated—and interrupted.