"Ahhhhh." It was a long satisfied sigh, escaping Perry's bleeding lips. "Oh, yes. Yessssssssss."

The scar drew up on my wrist and began to ache. This wasn't the usual burning as I yanked etheric energy through it. I tore my eyes from Belisa's slumped form and turned my right wrist up.

The print of Perry's lips was not a scar now. It was black, as if the flesh itself was rotting, and it pulsed obscenely. As I watched the edges frayed, little blue vein-maps crawling under the surface of my flesh.

And I knew why. I could have shot around her.

But I'd chosen not to.

The dog-thing that used to be Vanner hung motionless over me. Further away, seen through vibrating, glassy air, Anya Devi extended in a leap, her long dark hair a silver-scarred banner. One of the bullets was just exiting the gun in her left hand, the explosion behind it clearly visible. Saul crouched on the grimy black-and-white squares, the fringe on his jacket unsettled, standing straight up. They were utterly, eerily still.

The hellhound itself was leaping for Anya. It was wounded, sprays of black ichor hanging behind it like fine lacework scarves.

"We have a little time," he said.

Henderson Hill's caretaker crouched easily next to me, stroking the sleek head of the canine thing on top of me. Same faded coveralls, with the snarl of embroidery hiding his name. His eyes were bright clean blue, no longer filmed. And the shadow of scarring on his face was clearing up nicely. Alone of all the things at the Hill, he'd always just looked solid.

Normal.

Well, this sort of shot the idea of normal in the head, didn't it? He wasn't any species of nightsider I'd ever come across. He was something else. I'd been wanting to talk to him, and I'd thought I might find him here. Or even just a clue to where he was likely to be hiding once he dropped a quarter in me, pulled my arm, and set me spinning.

He'd brought Belisa to the operating room and turned her loose on the hellbreed in there. He'd also bought me breakfast right after I clawed my way out of my own grave. He'd given me my gun and my ring.

Which made him a question mark, at best.

I blinked. What the fuck? My fingers cramped on the whip, I kept the tension up. Everything stayed still, the movie of life paused and nobody thinking to warn me about it. So I wet my lips and wished I hadn't, something foul was spread on my face. "What. The fuck."

He grinned, a boyish expression, while he scratched behind the dog-thing's ears with his expressive, callused hand. The shadow of sorrow in those blue eyes didn't lighten. "Do you know how liberating it is to actually speak? Don't worry," he added in a rush. "I mean you no harm."

Oh, I'm not so sure about that. "Get this thing off me." A harsh croak, something stuck in my throat.

"Can't. I can only break the laws of the physical so far. Little Judy, listen to me."

I went stiff. Resisting. My jaw creaked when I finally loosened it enough. "Don't. Call me. That." That's a dead girl's name, and I've had enough of people saying it to me.

"Very well. Kismet, then. You named yourself for Fate, didn't you. As a holy avenger. Much the way your predecessor Jack Karma did. You're rather amazingly alike; all of you choose those like yourselves. It's..." He shrugged slightly. His tan workman's boots made a small sound as he shifted, their rubber soles grinding on dust and dirt. "It hurts to see, sometimes."

"What the fuck are you?" I breathed. Because the gem was making a low, satisfied note, and the flood of etheric energy up my arm had turned warm and caramel-soft.

Well, that answered that question, didn't it.

"Call me Mike. I'd shake your hand, but you're busy. Kismet, Hyperion must be stopped."

Hyperion?

My brain did another one of those sideways jags. Perry. That's what other hellbreed call him. Galina calls him Pericles, because he's old. Mikhail just called him "that motherfucker at the Monde." My breath jagged in, with a ratcheting sound. "No kidding."

"You don't understand. Everything has been according to his plan. Everything. Except your final act-the little break in the pattern. Do you remember what you did?"

My head ached, fiercely. The buzzing came back, rising inside me on a black tide. "No." I struggled, achieved exactly nothing. I was nailed in place. I could breathe, and my heart was a live wire jumping and sizzling inside my chest. I could even tighten up on the creaking leather of the whip.

But I couldn't move.

"You sacrificed yourself, Kismet. For the sake of many." He was grave now, a blush of color high up on his cheekbones. Before, he'd been horrifically scarred, the gray film over his eyes somehow making him gentler. This man looked like the caretaker's handsome older brother, his hair lifting and curling, taking on a richer gold. "That makes...certain things...possible."

Now it was a laugh, tearing free of my resisting chest. "What things? What the hell?"

He leaned down even further. Those eyes were pitiless, terrible. They were not burning with a hellbreed's fire. No, they were simply sad. A sadness like a knife to the heart, numb grief when the night rises and the bottle is empty and the voice of every failure and weakness starts to rumble in the bottom of your brain like a bad earthquake.

Cops get that look after a while, sometimes in stages, sometimes all at once. Other hunters, too. Sometimes, looking in the mirror while I smeared eyeliner on, I've caught glimpses of it.

It's the look of seeing too much. Of being unable to turn away.

"Go to Hyperion. Do what is necessary to convince him you're intrigued. Pretend your friends have thrown you out, whatever you like. But go. I am asking you to play Judas to a hellbreed, so that when he laughs in the moment of his triumph you can strike him down. You can be our avenging hand."

Which brought up the very first question I needed to ask, the first of many I wanted fully answered. "And who the hell is we, white man?"

I didn't think he'd get the joke, but he smiled. It was a terrible smile as well, that sadness staining through the expression, and a sick feeling began right under my breastbone. A low, nasty buzz mounted in my ears, little sticky feet probing and tickling all over my face, down my throat, down my aching, immobile body.

"You know who we are." His shoulders set.

"I don't know a single-" I began, but my heart was skipping triple time, and his hands were coming forward. He was going to touch me, and everything in me cringed away from the notion. "No. Don't. Don't."

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I would bear this for you, if I could."

I strained, black spots dancing at the edges of my vision, sweat rising in huge pearly drops, terror like wine filling my veins. I made a helpless sound, and I hated it immediately. It was the gasp of a very bright, very needy dark-haired girl huddled in her bedroom or shivering on a street corner, a girl under someone's fists. A girl begging and pleading. Please. Please don't. Oh please don't.

"I have been with thee from the beginning," he said very softly, and his fingers clamped on my head. White light exploded inside my skull, and it hurt.

It was like dying all over again. Or mercifully-or maybe just practically-I can't now say what it felt like. I can't remember.

And I don't ever want to.

22.

Hip popped up, heel stamping down, massive lung-tearing effort and the doglike thing spun to the side as I wrenched its head and flung it. Shove at the head and the body will follow; it's a basic law of anatomy. My whip reeled free, flechettes spilling out with a jingle, and I was up in a hot heartbeat, whip end snaking out and me right behind it. Throwing myself across space to crash into the hellhound at the apex of its leap, whip looping and turned taut, straining. Gunfire popped, bullets splattering behind us, and I wasn't quite sure why I'd done this.

Then I remembered. Saul.

We hit the shipwrecked desk, and my right hand was full of knife hilt. The blade slid in, twisted, the silver laid along its flat flaring with sudden blue radiance, and the warmth on my chin was blood as the thing snarled in my face. It couldn't get any purchase; the whip was now wrapped around it and pulled tight, my legs clamped around it too and the tearing in my side was ribs broken, again, dammit, can I just go five seconds without another bone snapping please God thank you- I bent back as the head snaked forward, teeth snapping near my throat, rank hot breath touching my chin and Henderson Hill shuddering again on its foundations. The knife punctured its gluey hide, cut deep, drag on the blade as unholy muscle gripped it, silver hissing and sparking as it grated hard against ribs. Tearing it free, rolling, splinters shredding against my coat's surface, the cubbyholes behind the desk exhaling dust as a current of bloodlust foamed up their surface, and I cut the thing's throat in one sweep.

Arterial gush sprayed, thin black-brackish and stinking. I blinked it away, knee coming up, and realized I'd almost taken the hound's head off. The neck broke with a glassy snap as I heaved it aside, dusty corruption racing through its tissues; it slumped off the desk and fell.

The voices in the air around me sighed, a hundred little sharp-toothed children all exhaling in wonder. For a moment the Hill pressed down, the psychic ferment shoving against my aura like it wanted to get in.

I pushed air out past my lips, hard, blowing through a thin scrim of hellbreed ichor. The shit was all over me, dammit. But there was that second thing to worry about too, and I was already rolling, dropping off the desk with a jolt, legs and ribs protesting as etheric force hummed through me and I shook the whip, the knife spun and held with the flat of the blade back along my arm. Anya could shoot the fuckers all she wanted, but my forte was knifework, and it was looking like I could take a hell of a lot more damage than she could.

You know what we are, he whispered inside my head.

Mike. What kind of a name was that for what I suspected he might be?

Anya was covering the door. Saul stood, brushing his shoulders gingerly, as if he'd been showered with dust.

"Where?" One clipped syllable, but I said it too loud and the foyer rippled. The spangles of Anya's aura, their spines popping out and shifting uneasily, roiled as she sighed and slowly lowered her guns. Her coat creaked a little as she did, and the tension humming through her made lines of force swirl in the thickened, dusty air.

"It ran off." She spared me one swift, very blue, very annoyed glance. "You want to tell me what the hell just happened here, Kismet?"

"Something was in Vanner. It busted free, I slapped it pretty hard and took out the hellhound, and Vanner...Jesus Christ, what was that? I haven't seen anything like that before."

"I have. Dogsbody." Tight and unamused. "Why the fuck did it run off?"

Gooseflesh rippled under my skin before training clamped down on my hindbrain. I shivered. No fucking way. "That was a dogsbody?" Should've taken my head clean off. Jesus Christ. "It can't be. Nobody's bleeding." I shut my mouth, realized how absurd it sounded. "Well, except for me. But that's normal."

"Take a look. That rag laying on the stairs is just skin. That rookie's a day-running dog full of hellhound venom now, and we'd better get going if we're gonna track him."

"No need." My mouth was numb. The knife slid into a sheath, I slid my right-hand gun free just in case. Everything inside me was shaking and shivering. An internal earthquake, bits popping and shattering inside my skull, puzzle pieces dropping into place.

Still too much I don't know.

"No need," I repeated. The Hall quivered, and a cold draft blew between us, rustling paper trash with a sound like drowned fingers slipping free of their skin. "I know where he's going."

We made it back to Galina's just as afternoon shadows began lengthening. The heat was a hammerblow, the worst of the day, and Anya was white-knuckled on the steering wheel. The way some of the shadows were twisting oddly, I didn't blame her. And with Saul riding terribly exposed back in the truck bed, it was a nerve-wracking slalom for me, too. Especially since I could swear we were followed, or at least watched. I just couldn't tell who was doing the watching.

Anya slammed the absinthe bottle down on the butcher-block table. Venomous green liquid sloshed inside it. "All right. I've had it. Talk."

Galina still kept the Jack Daniels in the cabinet above her ancient Frigidaire. I had to go up on tiptoe to get it, and I left a smear on the fridge's chilly white enamel. The hellhound's ichor was drying to a gummy black paste on me, and I was filthy with the ancient dust of Henderson Hill.

Low golden light fell over the herbs in Galina's kitchen window, and the Sanctuary was in the door watching both of us, her hands tightly laced together. Her tone was soft, conciliatory. "He's downstairs pacing. Theron is watching him. Gil's trying to escape through the sunroom, and Hutch won't come out of the vault."

"Vault's a good place for him." I worked the top free, considered the bottle, and took a long pull. It burned going down, and I could pretend it was the alcohol heat making my eyesight waver. The gem purred on my wrist. "Nervous type, our Hutch. Has anyone told him I'm alive?"

"Jill-" Galina, trying to forestall the explosion.

It didn't work. Anya Devi had waited long enough. "Kismet, start fucking talking. I've been keeping this town on the map since you disappeared, and now this? This? You just vanished and reappeared across a whole fuckload of empty space. Not even hellbreed are that fast. And why didn't that dogsbody tear you up, huh? What did you do out there?"

The world stopped, and I had a visitation from a hallucination. I grimaced at the fridge. My hair hung in long strings, matted with hellbreed ick, and I didn't have nearly enough silver to tie into it. "Do you believe in God?"

"What?" My fellow hunter sounded about ready to have a heart attack.

I didn't blame her. "It's a simple fucking question, Devi. Do you?" I took another hit off the bottle, to stop myself from saying more.

"No." Sharply, now. Liquid sloshing inside a bottle. "I believe in booze, and in ammo, and in being prepared. But God? No. Fuck no."

"Neither do I." It gave me no comfort to admit it. "I pray like everyone else, when my ass is going to be blown sideways. But I don't believe. Hellbreed I believe in, and they predate anything we might think of as God, right? By a long shot."

"I like history." Anya drummed her fingers on the tabletop. "Really I do. And philosophy's a great discipline too. Foundation of the humanities. But for fuck's sweet everloving sake, Jill, not now."

I held out my right hand. It shook, slightly, the tremor running through my bones making the flesh quiver. I didn't have a lot of flesh on me to shiver, still scrawny as hell. My stomach twisted on itself, and I was guessing my metabolism was burning as hot as a Were's for a while to speed the healing. My ribs were tender, and my shirt was a blood-soaked rag.

Also, I needed to calm down. Unfortunately, that didn't look like it had any goddamn chance of happening.

I stared at the Frigidaire and the smears I'd left on it. I fouled everything I touched, didn't I. I had from the beginning, from the moment I ruined my mother's rootless life by being conceived. Then there were her fist-happy boyfriends, and the street boys, and Val. So many shapes of men.

And Mikhail? If I'd been better, faster, stronger, maybe he could have told me about the bargain he'd made with Perry. He wouldn't have hidden it from me, which meant maybe Perry wouldn't have been able to jerk me from one end to the other and play me so neatly-and finally, finally trap me.

"I remember what I did now," I whispered. "I damned myself. Didn't I."

"Galina." Scrape of a chair as Anya stood up. "Give us the room, huh? And keep the boys downstairs."

"But-" Galina must have swallowed any objection, because the next sound I heard was her bare footsteps shushing away.

They sounded, for the first time, like an old woman's shuffle instead of a girl's light step.

Devi approached, softly but definitely making noise. "Something on your mind, Jill? You bleed clean, and I don't know what that thing on your wrist is, but it isn't hellbreed. I bet you went out into the desert and played one last game with Perry, and got free the only way you could." Reasonable, even, spacing out the chain of logic. "That far, at least, I can get on my own. But what the fuck else, Jill? What else happened?"

I blinked, a trickle of warm salty water easing down my filthy cheek. The booze wasn't doing any good. It might as well have been milk.

I am asking you to play Judas to a hellbreed. Either it was a hallucination who'd bought me breakfast and slipped Belisa's leash, or it was real. If it was real, I was just given my marching orders, wasn't I?

But orders from who, and why? And if it wasn't real, was it because I wanted to go back to the Monde? Or because I was looking for a way out, any way out of what was going to happen next, so I could ease my conscience and go riding off into the sunset with Saul? Leaving Anya to pick up the pieces. If she could.

She'd certainly try. She was hunter.

What did that make me?

"Belisa's dead." I weighed both words, found them wanting. The rest stuck in my throat, but I had to force them loose somehow. "I shot her because I wanted to. It wasn't a clean kill, Devi."

"Yeah, well." She paused. I sensed her nearness. "I don't blame you. But that's not the point, is it."

Thank God she understood. But of course she did.

She was a hunter. We commit the sin of murder every night, we who police the nightside. When you're trained to do that, when mayhem is an everyday occurrence, you have to have something to keep you from going over the edge. From making you worse than the things you hunt.

There's a lot of words for it, but I've only ever found one.

"No. It's not." I capped the bottle again. "Perry's planning something big. The caretaker out at Henderson Hill is in on it somehow. I've got to dig further." The half-formed idea that had been trying to wriggle its way out from under a bunch of soupy terror finally came out into the light, and I let out a long sigh.

Thank God. One card in my hand, at least.