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I picked up the pen. There was nothing else that could have expressed what I felt for her, or what I had to do. I hesitated, scrawled one more word.
Goodbye.
I ducked out of her office. The place was deserted. I made it down the stairs and out of the station, the spade necklaces dangling in my hand before I remembered what and who I was, and stuffed them in my pocket.
Come and get me now, Mirovitch, I thought, waiting for the lash of pain down my back, waiting for the phantom wounds to reopen.
They didn't. Instead, an ice-cold wall of fury closed around me, impenetrable, shutting me away. My quarry was in front of me, the track clear, my revenge assured. I was going to make him pay, no matter who he was. Lourdes, Mirovitch, the fucking King of the Rats—I was going to kill him.
Now it was personal.
Chapter Thirty
I still needed food. Seven restaurants later, the late-afternoon sun glittered in my eyes as I ended up in a pub in the eastern fringe of Saint City, sandwiched between the city and the lake. I was working my way toward the Bridge going east on instinct, from one meal to the next. The necklaces were a weight in my pocket. I hadn't precisely lied—I didn't know exactly where Lourdes was, but I could feel a little tingle in my subconscious. I'd hunted down too many psychopaths and criminals not to know that little tingle. It meant that I was close and on the right track. The bounty hunter in me was satisfied, and that was good enough for now.
I set down the pint of beer, wiping my lips with the back of my hand, and studied the demolished large-size pizza in front of me. I hate the taste of beer, but it provides a lot of carbs in a very short time, and I needed fuel. I felt like a goddamn glutton, but I was hungry.
I sighed. From a back booth, my eyes tracked through the dark pub. The holovid feeds were showing an advert for the newest series about a group of Ceremonials in East Los Dangeles-Frisco. For hating psions so much they certainly love to watch us on the holovids, I thought, as I always did.
Then the feed switched and it showed my house, the familiar grainy images of the column of flame rising. I watched, my fingernails tapping the table. Gabe had thought Lourdes and Mirovitch had gotten to me in my own house, or trailed me away from the burning wreckage. She must have been worried, worried sick. A better friend than I deserved; Gabe had never let me down.
I watched, my eyes nailed to the display. Inside the column of flame, something twisted.
Something dark and swirling like obsidian smoke.
A vaguely human shape stretched in the middle of the fire, spreading its slender black wings, hands upraised. Then the column of fire was sucked back toward the figure, a Shockwave rattling the camera.
I watched, my jaw dropping. What the fucking hell?
The flames didn't stop, but they were pulled back in, wreathing around the dark figure, which lifted its head as if searching. Then, maddeningly, the picture stopped, dissolving in a burst of static. My face flashed on the holovid, a thumbnail up to the right of an a
The a
What was in my house? Was it Lourdes? Had he somehow been there, stalking me while I was blind with grief, and my torching the house had taken him by surprise? My throat went dry, my right hand clenching into a fist.
But I hadn't sensed Mirovitch or Keller. And even crazed with grief I was sure I would have noticed the cloying psychic stench of the Headmaster.
It couldn't be. It couldn't be.
Can it be that you have not resurrected him?
"Impossible." My voice startled me. I glanced around, catching a few frightened looks from the normals who were giving me a wide berth. "Im-fucking-possible."
Figment of the imagination. Or, if not… Santino had used the Egg against Japhrimel, and Lucifer had finished the job by beating him to death once he was already wounded. Would fire and Power do what I'd thought blood might do, and bring a demon back to life? Rebuild a demon's shattered body from ash? Even a Fallen demon?
Don't get distracted, Da
But I had the necklaces, didn't I? I was the target now.
I walked down the street, my hands clasped around the scabbard. My sword hummed inside the sheath, a subliminal song of Power. After a while I noticed that people were spilling out of my way while I walked. When I passed into a belt of residential buildings and the sidewalks were empty under old trees turning red and orange and white for winter, it was a relief. I crunched through wet-smelling fallen leaves and kept moving.
The sun was setting by the time I made it to the Bridge.
With hovertraffic being what it was, the huge Bridge was in a state of disrepair. But slicboarders can't go over water, and foot or wheelbike traffic needed the Bridge. A thriving traffic rumbled over the lake, and there was a rail line to take land supplies that for one reason or another couldn't go by hover transport.
I needed to go east, and I wanted to walk, so it was the Bridge or nothing.
On the west side, the old main roads zigzagged down the hill. I cut through the bands of shrubbery and wished I'd thought to keep my slicboard, or rent one. The edge of the river curled away under the begi
The Bridge lay on the surface of the glass-calm lake, an architectural triumph when it was made five hundred years ago, revamped every few decades. The original concrete was crumbling, but haphazard repairs are done every year, and plasilica and new steel had been hammered in a few years ago during a grand reconstruction funded by Hegemony grants and City Hall. Algae drifted thick on the lake, harvested and distilled by the biotechs or anyone with a chem degree and a few thousand credits' worth of equipment. The last wave of additive-laced Clormen-13 had come from here; tainted and cut with some thyoline-based substance to make it more harsh and addictive. Not like Chill needed any help.
I could have been over the Bridge in a short time if I'd gotten a slic or used some of my demon speed, but I shivered, continued walking. The pond that the boathouse on the Hall grounds stood near fed into the river, I was sure of it. Even being this close to water that had touched the grounds of that cursed place was enough to make my blood turn cool and loose in my veins.
The more I thought about it, the more miraculous it was that the Black Room had managed to meet anywhere on the grounds, especially in the same place more than once, even if Keller only took the members there one at a time. Mirovitch had been unca