The Devil's Right Hand

Clear coldness settled over me. In the end, everything boiled down to one thing—what I had to do. Even if I loved Japh, I couldn’t be a slave.

I heard McKinley’s voice, low and urgent. Then, a soft light rap on the hotel room’s door. Demons, here and knocking at the door.

A static-laden silence smashed through the room. Then a crunching, smashing impact; the bathroom door rattled against its hinges. A low, coughing snarl—a hellhound.

Just before all hell broke loose, I took a deep breath, stepped back, and pointed my plasgun at the wall. Power spiked under my skin, and I squeezed the trigger.

Chapter 36

Night lay thick and heavy over Demilitarized Sarajevo. It felt strange to be in a city of paranormals, but the static in the air was enough to hide even me for once. I crouched in the lee of a dark alley, listening to the snarling as two werecain engaged in a deep philosophical discussion about something out on the pavement across the cobbled square, right in front of the Haunt Tais-toi nightclub.

Nightclub is too kind a word. It was a Nichtvren haunt, communal feeding ground, and social gathering spot rolled into one. Instead of thick shielding to keep the hungry Power contained, this had only token barriers—after all, who would be stupid enough to attack a haunt in Sarajevo? And besides, there were no normals or psions around to keep away from the well of carnivorous Power because of the risk of Feeders.

This particular haunt had been a temple once, a twin-towered cathedral in the café section of Sarajevo, facing out onto a wide square now eddying with every conceivable shape and size of paranormal. Species I’d only read about in school lived here in their own enclaves, and night was the time they came out to play.

My shields shivered, demon-strong and flexible. I blinked a few times, feeling a purely human reaction uncomfortably like what any prey would feel in the presence of predators. Maybe I wasn’t fully human anymore—but I’d been born one, and something blind and old inside me recognized that to these creatures, the Da

My head still felt tender from the plasgun-plus-Power burst. True to my guess, the wall hadn’t been pure stone, just plasteel struts and sheetrock with thin marble tiles. It had blown out nicely. I, on the other hand, had slid into the glassed-in shower. The single low stone wall between the shower and the bathtub provided perfect cover as I buttoned myself as tightly down as I could. My feet had crunched on broken glass from the shower door. The mark on my shoulder bit down with sudden pain as the demon attackers, followed by McKinley and Japhrimel, streaked out into the hotel. I heard a werecain’s howl—the guard at the top of the stairs. Everyone thought I’d busted out and was ru

Jeez, not too bright, I’d thought, my breath still choked in my throat. Then I’d scrambled out through the hole in the wall, Power bleeding into the air from where my strike had smashed through Japhrimel’s demon-laid wards. Any other demon’s shielding, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do so—but I wore Japh’s mark, and his wards weren’t meant to strike against or harm me.

Or so I’d hoped, and turned out to be right. Besides, the smashing against the front door meant the shields were automatically concentrating to throw back the force of that attack and were thus more vulnerable here.

Low and silent, I turned to the left and was around the corner in another hall before I heard the crashing chaos of a hell of a fight behind me. I didn’t wait around. Instead, I kicked in a door, and—thank Anubis—found a room with actual windows. A swanhild room, actually, with a large round nestingbed full of feathery stuff. I didn’t stop to apologize to the screaming swanhild trio that greeted me, feathers swirling around their shocked faces and narrow naked torsos. I simply dove out the plasglass window and was gone before the attacking demons had realized I’d outsmarted them. The drop hadn’t been pleasant, but it hadn’t hurt me much.

Finding the Haunt Tais-toi had been as easy as getting to a busy street and politely asking a passing swanhild, then following her careful directions.

The psychic interference was so intense I couldn’t scan the place. Nichtvren poured in, and I spotted a whole pack of werecain—from an alpha in a long leather coat all the way down to a few teenage pups. A few swanhild decked out in silver chains, miniskirts, and not a lot else waltzed in the front door.

There wasn’t a lot of hover traffic. I guess the paranormals around here didn’t use them—who needed a hover when you could use the Nichtvren shimmer-trick, or when a werecain could cover ten blocks of city street in seconds? Swanhild were territorial and rarely traveled despite their messaging system, and kobolding hated to leave wherever they’d been hatched.

At least if there aren’t a lot of hovers, I might not get hit with one.

I checked the street again. Too many shadows. Any one of them could hold a demon, and the interference was intense enough I wouldn’t know it in time.

I was pretty sure I’d shaken all pursuit, and the interference that would hide them would hide me a lot better, since I wasn’t as big a disturbance in the Power flow.

Da