Redemption Alley

Chapter Twenty-seven

The tanks were huge glassy cylinders of greenish liquid. In each clear tube, a scurf floated, in varying stages of maturity. The smell was enough to make my eyes run even with the door blasted open and sunlight scouring a rectangle of yellow linoleum.

There were two rows of the green tubes, each lit with ghostly non-UV light. There were dissection tables, and a long bookcase along one wall, stacked with reference works and binders.

Leon helped me drag the Trader to a table and bandage him. Leon also snapped silver cuffs on him, just in case. Meanwhile, I stared at the closest tube full of green viscous stuff, and the scurf floating, eyes closed. “They’re preserved.” My gorge rose, hot and hard at the back of my tongue. “Jesus.”

Leon gave them barely half a glance and turned an interesting shade of pale. His amulets clinked. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Check the books.” I tipped my head at the bookcases and holstered a gun, then set about trying to wake the Trader up. It was hard—he’d lost a lot of blood, but he was tougher than the average human. Then again, it didn’t look like he’d Traded for anything good, like superstrength or invulnerability.

But then, there were those teeth. And his hands looked fu

“Virology. Chemical composition of antidepressants. The Anarchist’s Cookbook, even.” Leon snagged that one, it vanished into his coat pocket. “Looks like a first edition too.”

“Kleptomaniac.” One whole wall of the trailer/hangar was taken up with chem-lab equipment. They’d been cooking something up, out here in the desert. The Trader started to come around, his eyes rolling back down in his head. He shifted uneasily, the silver cuffs clanking, and cringed when he caught sight of me. “He’s waking up. Check that stuff over there, will you? Didn’t you take chemistry?”

“Once in m’benighted youth, darlin’. Left as soon as I figured out how to make beer and fertilizer explosives.”

“Now there’s a combination.” Both of us took care not to turn our backs to the door. The scurf floated eerily in their green tubes. They didn’t look dead, just… sleeping, caught in a moment of rare immobility, like during daylight when they pack themselves together like sardines.

I shuddered. Leon was all white now, pale even under the fishbelly of “night-walking hunter.” His eyeliner had turned garish against the new pallor. From the cold feeling in my cheeks, I probably wasn’t far behind.

The smell was incredible. Fresh tears trickled down my cheeks—and the scar puckered itself up into a tiny mouth, a thrill of painful heat ru

“Irene…” the Trader moaned. He woke up all the way and blinked at me, like a six-year-old coming out of a nightmare.

This is goddamn ridiculous. “Hey, Sleeping Beauty. Start talking.”

“You’re her.” He gasped in breath again. He really did sound awful, but then he’d taken a load of silver in the side from Rosita. I wouldn’t be too peppy myself under those circumstances. “Kismet. You’re actually her.”

“No shit.” Who else would be doing this? “The question is, who the fuck are you? But that can wait. Is there anyone else here? Anyone at all?”

“J-just the subjects.” He winced and the cuffs clanked, blue sparks ru

Another week? “What’s in another week?”

Blond stubble covered his cheeks. He looked like a watered-down version of Hutch, weak-eyed as a mole. The lab coat covered a frame that wasn’t even wiry-strong, just wiry.

Still, he knocked me over. Must be something in there. Looks can be deceiving, especially when it comes to Traders. And what’s the story with him and Irene?

“The Summoning,” he whispered. “They’re not due for another week. When the moon’s dark. Then they… they—”

Oh shit. A summoning? “They what?” I had a sneaking suspicion I knew.

Argoth. Or other seriously bad news.

“They won’t tell me.” He cringed against the surgical table we’d laid him on, instruments rattling. It took me a moment to figure out why he looked familiar—there was the same ratty little gleam in his eyes as in Irene’s, a gleam I wasn’t sure I liked. “Only that he is coming, and he wants this place. I keep my ears open, so does Irene. When he comes… they have the formula, they’ll make as much of it as they want—”

“Formula for what?” And why do I have this sinking feeling like I know who “he” is?

“For the sickness.” He cringed again as I loomed over him, even though I hadn’t moved. “For Dream.”

I frowned. “What sickness?”

He made a short sketching motion, arrested when I twitched, a hair away from breaking his arm. “Bioweapon. They came to me with samples. I thought they were from the government. They said, what can you do with this? It was a good job, I took it—and then they took Irene. Said I had to start working, and working quick, or Irene would be dead before—”

Bioweapon? Oh Christ Jesus. “Samples?” Keep him on track, Jill.

“From—” His eyes flicked nervously to one of the green tubes. But his face had lit up, just like a mad scientist talking about his monster. “From them. They got live ones from somewhere, a lot of them. Finally figured out to put ’em in the xarocaine and the cellular burn stops, they die but don’t rot. It’s a preservative. Used the same process for—”

“There’s some Day-Glo purple powder over here, Jill.” Leon’s tone cut through the Trader’s babble. “All in little Ziplocs. Looks ready for shipment.”

The Trader nodded jerkily, his hair flopping. “It is ready. It starts changing on the first hit, you can deliver it through the water supply; it could possibly go airborne if I had enough time. But I can’t figure out how to stop the replication yet. The side effects—”

Dear God. The smell was worse now, because drafts of fresh air were spilling in the open door. A fresh gout of stench hit each time the wind shifted, and the breaths of not-so-bad air only served to underscore the reek. “Side effects?” It was like questioning a waterfall, hard to keep him on one topic, words spilling out past those sharklike teeth.

Oh yeah. Definitely Dr. Frankenstein material.

“These things, whatever they are… the viral replication is just endless, it remodels the genetic code and eats up hemoglobin like nobody’s business. So the Dream—that’s what I call it—hits hard and fast like a Mack truck, but the side effects, they can’t go out in the sun, their pupils get all dilated, and they get thirsty. They tear each other up, and when one of them starts to bleed—” His shudder echoed mine. “It’s in the blood. I could engineer the effect for just a quick death and stop the mutation if they would give me more time. But they said—I thought they were from the government. Who else would want something like this?”

“Holy shit.” I eyed him. Is this for real? “You’re kidding.”

“Once it’s perfected—”

“Shut up.” Men like you made the atom bomb, you waste. I didn’t need any help putting together the consequences. No wonder hellbreed were crawling all over this, it had all the things they like in a weapon. But what was the co

Was it just because it would cause enough death to feed a hungry high-class hellbreed just out of Hell? Something even worse than a talyn?

I hate those sorts of questions.

“I say we put a fuckin’ bullet in his head and burn this place to the ground.” Leon racked Rosita, but his eyes were steady.