Dead Man Rising

Then the shame started as I tipped my head back down. Here I was at Jace's bedside, and I couldn't stop thinking about a dead demon. If Japhrimel could be resurrected, I would have resurrected him by now. I wasn't worth either of them, goddammit.

I snatched my hand back. "I can't." The words tasted like ash in my mouth. I lifted my left hand, weighted with my sword, let it drop heavily back down to my side. "Gabe, I c-can't."

Silence. Was she looking at Eddie? Was he looking back, sharing her pain? Pain shared, pain halved. How many times had I leaned on Jace, letting him take my pain, blind to everything but my own selfishness? And yet he'd given up everything, including his life, thinking he could protect me from still more. I stumbled back a blind two steps, and Eddie's arm closed over my shoulders. I flinched, almost ready to drive an elbow into his ribs and duck away, but control clamped down on combat instinct just in time. The Skinlin's arm tightened, and the heavy edge of his coat brushed mine. He was warm, very warm for a human, and smelled most of all like freshly-turned earth.

He said nothing. It was a new world record, Eddie refraining from a snarky comment for longer than ten seconds. A bloody fucking miracle.

Gabe stepped up to the bedside. She had unsheathed a knife, cold steel. It was, after all, traditional. She didn't glance at me. Instead, her pretty face was set and white as she looked down at Jace's still form, its chest rising and falling with macabre regularity. "Would you like to say anything, Da

"You think he can hear me?" I tried to sound brave. But my voice was too high-pitched and breathy, again lacking the terrible velvet weight of demon's seduction or the ruined hoarseness of Lucifer's final gift to me, when his fingers crackled in my throat.

She smiled, still looking down at his face. He looked peaceful, the lines smoothed away and his hair combed back from his face. As if he was sleeping. "The dead can always hear us, Da

And gods help me, but I did. Only the knowledge held no comfort, even for me. My shoulders hunched. Eddie's arm tightened. I swallowed ash, tasted bitterness. "I'm sor—" Gulped down air, tried again. "I'm sor—" And again, the sounds that were choked halfway. I couldn't say it now, when it mattered most of all.

"Gods," Eddie whispered. "Gabe." He was shaking, a fine tremor that leapt to me as if we were both drunk or sick. I think my knees may have buckled, because I leaned into him.

She understood, and moved forward, one pale narrow hand resting on Jace's forehead, the other holding the knife tucked back against her forearm. Her sleek dark hair gleamed in the light, and the sparkles of her aura began to pulse. "Jason Monroe," she said quietly, her voice carrying ancient authority, "travel well. Be at peace."

Noooooo … I swallowed the moan, locked my teeth, refused to let it out. Still, a low hurt sound came, whether from me or from Eddie I couldn't tell. Didn't want to know. Gabriele's aura flashed, and for a moment I seemed to see blue flame crawling up her arm. The knife flicked, steel glittering in the weak autumn sunlight, and a sigh echoed through the room. The machines stopped their beeping and booping. Silence rang like a bell through the room, a silence I had heard so many times but never like this, never when I was the one trying to scream and utterly unable to do so.

"And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest," Gabe whispered softly, tenderly. His eyes were closed, but she laid her hand over them anyway, as if closing them. Her aura faded back to its usual sparkles, her shielding humming as it settled into place. Tears glittered on her pale cheeks. The blood had drained from her face, and fresh shame bit me. What had it cost her to do this for me, something I was too weak to do for myself?

Jace. Jason…

I managed to find my balance, slowly. Eddie let me go as soon as I pulled away from him. I took the deepest breath of my life, seemingly endless, my ribs crackling as I inhaled, and inhaled, and inhaled. My aura throbbed.

I stepped up to the side of the bed. Gabe didn't look at me. She studied Jace's sleeping face as if the secrets of the universe were printed there. For all I know, they might have been.

Two fingers, tipped with black molecule-drip polish, I touched the back of his hand. Nothing there, not even the low glow of nerves slowly dying out, what Necromances call foxfire. She had done a good job. Her knife sang as it slid back into its sheath, softly, gently, clicking home.

It was too hard to look up. I stared at his hand. "Thank you." Amazingly, the words didn't stick in my throat. My broken voice sounded like sandpaper honey. The plain beige curtains ruffled uneasily.

Her free hand found my arm and squeezed once, hard. "You're my friend, Da

Maybe it's just that the debt gets so high you stop counting it. I freed her fingers from my arm gently, delicately. "Thank you." It sounded more natural now, more like myself. More like Da

Who the hell was she, though? I no longer knew.

"Da

I turned, digging my heel in, my boot scraping on the plasfloor. Then I headed for the door. Two long strides. I heard Eddie move and tensed, but his hand didn't close on me.

The words sent a chill up my spine. "Let her go," he told Gabe. "Gods above and below, just let her go."

It was too late. The door was closed. I was already gone.

Chapter Twenty-eight

It was child's play to slip back into my house without the reporters seeing. I came over the wall again, twisting to land lightly on my feet, and brushed my hands off. My lungs burned from ru

The god of Death did not bar me from using my strength now.

The sun was sinking, high dark clouds massing in the north. The first of the winter storms, not coming in from over the bay but sliding down the coast. I took a lungful of Saint City air, chill with approaching winter. My garden was ragged, unkempt; I had been too busy ru

I stopped a good twenty paces from my house, eyeing it critically. Bought with Doreen, as an abandoned dump when cheap property was the rule in this neighborhood because of the gang wars and derelicts, paid off completely with blood money, my haven and sanctuary rose above me, glowing with some freak ray of evening light.

I kicked my front door open, the doorframe shattering and spraying little splinters into my front hall. Choked, had to swallow cold iron. Tears, and grief. And something so huge I was afraid it would choke me.

The shields shivered, each layer of energy vibrating. The layers of shielding Jace had applied were fading; it would take a long time for them to fully vanish without his reinforcing. Months, maybe, if I didn't put a shuntline in and take them down myself. But I didn't have that sort of time, did I?

I stalked into the front hall, into my living room.

The candles on Jace's altar were out, the smell of burned wax filling the air. The dove's blood had splashed up out of the brass bowl, the painting of Saint Barbara rent and tattered.

So Jace's loa knew. Of course they knew. The spirits always know.

I looked at the tapestry on the west wall. Isis's face was turned away, and Horus's wings rustled uneasily, threads shifting against each other with soft, whispering, grieving sounds.

A cream-colored flash on my fieldstone altar caught my eye. I approached it slowly, each footstep seeming to take an eon, my boots making hard clicking sounds against hardwood and muffled thuds on my meditation-rug.