Lilith Saintcrow: Heaven's Spite

That never happened to Mikhail. What the hell?

The ’breed were all still as death. Bright eyes, painted lips, the shadows of what they really were rippling under their flesh.

I halted. Looked down at Rutger. Painted with hellbreed blood, down there on the floor, sniveling and whining. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

Do not ever underestimate, milaya. Mikhail’s voice inside my head. Is fine way to get ass blown off sideways.

“Come and try it.” I didn’t have to work to say it flatly. “Anytime, Rutger. That goes for every single Hell-trading one of you in this entire building. Whenever you’re brave enough, come and fucking try it .”

To really finish it off right I should have kicked him one last time. But it was more of an insult to leave him there and saunter out the front door like I had all night, the smell of burning trailing in my wake.

And a very, very bad feeling starting in the middle of my chest.

B eaky, skinny Hutch sat up and rubbed at his hazel eyes. He didn’t quite squeal, but it was close. “What are you doing? ”

I hadn’t been in here for very long. Maybe twenty seconds, hearing him sleep and regretting that I was going to wake him up. I know what it’s like to wake up with someone in the room, when you thought you were alone.

Hutch was lucky, though. It was just me.

“Same thing I do every time I wake you up in the middle of the night. Light.” I flipped on the bedside lamp, almost forgetting how I looked. Hutch squeaked and fisted his eyes even harder.

His living quarters were up above the bookstore, and his bedroom was full of extra shelving. Clothes hung next to bits of high-priced computer corpses, ready for him to strip out and use at a moment’s notice. He’d just come back from vacation two weeks ago, sunburnt and rested, and I’d met him at the airport with our local FBI liaison, Juan Rujillo. I’d finally gotten everything smoothed over from Hutch’s last escapade—the one he wasn’t covered for in court, because he hadn’t been hacking at my request. No, he’d just been proving he was still bulletproof in cyberspace.

I guess I hadn’t been keeping him busy enough. That was about to change.

“Jesus!” Hutch grabbed at the blankets. “Is it the cops? I haven’t done anything, I swear !”

“You know, every time I hear you say that, it fills me with despair. Because I know you’re lying or about to lie to me.” I tried not to sound so grimly amused. “Wake up and get your glasses on, Hutchinson. I need you.”

“Why don’t you keep normal hours?” He turned even paler than usual the moment it escaped his mouth. I magnanimously refused to comment. Instead, I put my back to the wall near the door—or, if you want to be precise, to the overflowing bookcase right next to the door. “Never mind, forget I asked. What’s up?”

“I want you to get on that goddamn computer and find something out for me.” I did not tack on a What did you think, I wanted to sing Christmas carols? But it was close.

“What something am I finding?” He grabbed his glasses and put them on, blinked frowstily.

Something that will help me avert another fucking apocalypse. “I’ll tell you once you’re downstairs with some coffee.”

“God.” He groaned, levering himself up out of bed. “Why don’t you pick on someone else?” His threadbare, penguin-covered boxers flapped; he picked them out of his ass crack and yawned. His narrow, sunken chest was sparse with wiry, reddish-dark hair, and you could see the scars up along the right side of his ribcage. Claw marks. You could see clearly where the hellbreed’s three fingers had dug in, flexing.

There are reasons why Hutch doesn’t ever want to get close to the nightside. He’s wiser than most.

“Because I like you so much, sweets.” I made a little kissy noise. Under the cuff, the scar was a wet, burning pucker. There was a hole in my T-shirt, and the red gleam of the Eye peered out through it. Above the Eye, the carved ruby—a pale imitation, to be sure—glowed as well. I did not reach up to play with it nervously, but my fingers itched.

He grabbed a Santa Luz Wheelwrights T-shirt from a pile of laundry on the floor, pulled it on over his head. “Don’t say things like that. God. Go make me some coffee. Jesus H.”

I slid out of the room and down the hall. The kitchen was as gleaming and shipshape as his room was messy and dusty. He had a state-of-the-art espresso and drip coffeemaker, complex enough to make a cappuccino by itself and pilot a rocket ship at the same time. I poked at it for a few moments, thought longingly of what a great sound it would make if I shot the damn thing, and figured out how to make the drip side work. After a search through every cabinet, I found the coffee canister in the fridge, exactly where Saul would have put it. By the time Hutch shuffled down the hall, reeking of Right Guard and scrubbing under his T-shirt with one hand, there were six cups of coffee and more dribbling out.

“I made a whole pot,” I said, and glanced at the window. Night pressed against the bulletproof glass. Each window up here was reinforced with silver-laced chicken wire.

“What am I looking for?” He looked marginally more awake, grabbed a Wheelwrights coffee mug, and yanked the coffeepot out. Thick dark liquid sploshed. “Jesus. You make coffee like my dad did.”

If it’s not strong, it’s not coffee. I shrugged. “I need you to go digging all over. Find me any disaster, anywhere on the globe, in the past six months big enough to let a talyn or bigger hellbreed slip through. I want you to cross-reference it with everything you can find on Argoth.”

He jerked. Coffee splashed. My hand arrived, caught the mug before it could fall more than a foot, and I straightened, subtracting the pot from him with my other hand. The liquid burned where it hit my hand; it soaked into the tattered sleeve of my coat. Hutch stepped back, barking his hip a good one on the counter. It was anyone’s guess whether he was disturbed by Argoth’s name or by me moving too quickly to be strictly normal.

“Holy shit . No way.” He shook his head, his hair standing up in bedhead spikes. “Not that again. Really?”

“I don’t know yet. Could be a red herring.” I finished pouring, slid the pot back in, and offered him the dripping mug. “But I need everything you can get. If there’s any breath of that bastard getting out of Hell and making trouble, I want to know where, what, and when. I also need you to brush up your Chaldean and look at the Sorrows calendar. See if there’s anything shaking down there.” A deep breath. I tried not to notice how he was going whiter than his usual pasty-boy at the thought. “There might be more.”

“Sorrows and Argoth? Jesus Christ.” He took the cup with shaking fingers. “They’re connected?”

“I don’t know , Hutch. I need you to do these things, and at noon today you pack everything you need for a siege and go to Galina’s.” Because I am not about to lose my apprentice or my pet researcher.

“Goddamn, Kismet. What kind of trouble are we talking about? No, wait. I don’t wanna know. I’ll get started right now. Anything else I should take to Galina’s?”

“Just whatever you’ll need to stay there for a while, and to keep up your research. Don’t open up today.” I cocked my head, listening. The entire neighborhood was quiet, and I’d made sure I was clean before even coming near the bookstore.

“Like customers are beating down my door anyway.” He blew across the top of his coffee, snagged a pad of paper placed precisely under the yellow phone bolted to the wall at the end of the counter, and looked around for a pen. “Sorrows calendar. Argoth—hey, I thought you barred him from coming through. That time, what, two years ago or something? That case with the scurf.”