Lilith Saintcrow: Heaven's Spite

The pattern showed itself for a blinding moment. The scar buzzed on my wrist, etheric energy jolting up my arm. The bezoar , securely caged, twitched madly in my pocket as if someone was yanking at my coat. I looked up, and every sorcerous sense I had informed me shit was about to get ugly.

I didn’t need intuition to tell me that. All I had to do was look at the creeping dusklit shadows clustering up to my car. Those shadows had eyes like flat russet coins, and teeth that sparked with phosphorescence. They hunched and lunged through the shadows with the peculiar, crippled speed of the damned.

“Jill?” Badger said cautiously. “You still there?”

“Gotta go. Keep digging, give my best to Rosie. And thanks.” I hung up, drew my guns. One of the low twisted things leapt up on the trunk of the Pontiac, and the car’s springs groaned as it growled. Its muzzle twisted up, showing ancient, yellowed teeth. Its front paws were shaped like hands except for the two or three extra fingers, enlarged knuckles, and tarnished ivory claws. It dented the metal, and irrationally, all I could think of was the paint job.

“Son of a bitch ,” I yelled, and launched myself forward. They melded out of the gathering dark, four of them, and spread out. Oh, this is gonna be fun.

At least I was sure I’d been poking around in the right way. They wouldn’t send rongeurdos —bonedogs—after me if I hadn’t been wandering around closer and closer to the truth.

The first one coiled down on its haunches, sprang with a deadly scraping of claws on concrete. I faded to the side, hit it twice at the top of its leap. It fell with a thump, steaming and scrabbling as blessed silver punched a hole in its shell and fragmented, filling it with poison.

The worst thing about the bonedogs is that they hunt in packs. The best thing? They die and stay down when you breach them with silver shot. And they never run by day.

Of course, that didn’t do me any good now.

As soon as I put that one down, another was leaping for me. I heard the little ding as the Circle K’s door opened, and I hoped nobody was coming out to take a look at the ruckus. You’d think even in the suburbs they would know to stay indoors when they hear gunshots.

My own leap was reflex, like a cat jumping back from a striking snake. I landed hard, already pitching to my right to draw them away from the convenience store’s entrance and whoever was stupid enough to be walking in or out. My boot flashed out, and the crunching shock of it meeting a ronguerdo ’s face jolted all the way up to my hip, but I was already turning and shooting the other one with both guns. Pushing off, arms pulled close and angular momentum conserved enough to give me a spin. When I faced the other two my left hand held my whip instead of a gun, and I felt much more sanguine about the situation. The whip jingled as I shook it, assuring myself of free play. “All right, you sonsabitches.” My voice, a bright thread over the deep twisting Helletöng-accented growls. “Come get some.”

The Talisman thumped on my chest, its song of destruction hiking up a notch.

One hung back as the other slunk forward, head down and lips lifted over a slavering snarl. Yellow foam spattered, writhing into cracks in the pavement in long oily ropes.

I was bracing myself for the one in front to leap when the one behind flung its head up and howled.

The howl was answered. Eastward, another cry lifted into the night. Then, to the south, another one.

Oh, fuck. Kill them quick, Jill.

I swung forward. Hip leading for the whip work, the force uncoiling through me and flinging out through my hand, gun speaking at the same moment as the bonedog jerked aside to avoid jingling razor-sharp silver. The second, his duty done, leapt too, but I’d gotten the first right through his broad canine skull. He dropped like a stone and I had the last one to worry about.

The last one was the smartest. He looked at me, those eyes widening and turning bright crimson instead of a low punky russet glow. The sky was indigo now. In winter, night falls quick and hard in the desert.

The thing scrabbled backward, turned tail, and ran.

I leapt for my car. Fast as I am, I can’t follow a bonedog on foot. With a V8 under me, though, I can track it as far as possible.

If the bezoar was reacting, I could track it even farther. That masked son of a bitch might have survived, but he wouldn’t survive what I was about to do to him. I could find out who he was really working for as a bonus.

But I thought I knew. And the knowledge chilled me all the way down to the bone.

You’ve gone too fucking far this time, you son of a bitch.

I piled into the car. She roused with a purr, and her tires smoked as I spun the wheel. I let off the brake and peeled out. There was an oof from the backseat, but I couldn’t do more than glance in the rearview and get a jumble of shadowy impressions, a flash of pale-copper flesh and the chain jingling. A merry, Christmas-like sound, but if you knew the real story behind Santa Claus you’d probably never want to hear sleigh bells again.

Hellbreed aren’t the only things that like tender little children. And don’t even get me started on the Tooth Fairy.

The bonedog was just visible down the street, nipping smartly around to the right. I gunned the engine and the Pontiac leapt for it, happy to be going fast again. The knocking in the upper registers of the engine’s roar was even more pronounced, I was really going to have to nail that down—

I checked the rearview again. Shadows ran like ink on wet paper. Little spots of red in the distance, loping along two by two.

More bonedogs.

The accelerator was already jammed against the floor.

Now it was a race.

A long, looping trail of rubber came to an abrupt stop. Something had blown in the engine. It didn’t matter—I bailed out, not caring that Belisa had rolled forward and was now half on the floor in the back.

She could stay there. I’d settle her hash after I settled Perry’s, when this was done.

The gates were shaking like epileptic hands. They banged together, and Henderson Hill rose behind them.

But something was wrong. It should have been a starlit sky, the waxing moon already risen like a yellow-silver coin. Instead, the vault of heaven was black, the stars blotted out and an unnatural dark covering my city like an old, veined hand.

Oh, this isn’t going to be fun.

I timed it just right, plunged between the gates. The Hill closed around me, I didn’t have time to slow down and see if it was going to try to make things tricky. Besides, something else was wrong—the bath of ice-cold prickles was much weaker than it should have been. I should have been hopping one step ahead of Henderson Hill’s voices, sparking off the thick sludge of etheric bruising.

Instead, the ghosts rushed at me in rotting cheesecloth veils. Their mouths were open in distorted screams. They poured through and past as if I was an empty door, splashing against the threshold where the bonedogs pulled up short, snarling.

The bezoar went nuts inside my pocket, straining against the silver cage and the leather. Buzzing like an angry bumblebee. A really big one.

One of the bonedogs put a paw over the threshold and snatched it back with a Helletöng-laden squeal, like metal rubbing against itself in an empty, echoing stadium. The Hill’s ghosts trembled on the edge of visibility, twisting together in boneless contortions to make a weird flowing screen.

A long black smear was the remains of the bonedog I’d chased in here. It bubbled, the eyes rolling free like weird crystalline fruits, the nerve roots decaying strings of quartz.