Lilith Saintcrow: Heaven's Spite

He’d gotten sassy. I shot him two or three times just to make him sit down and listen. Shen had been the eminence grise of Santa Luz, the only serious contender for Perry’s position and a thorn in Perry’s side. Rutger had big dreams, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to teach him who was boss. It was either that or have to kill him later and play roulette with whoever his replacement was.

So the Kat Klub was now the Folly. It kept the same hours—a cabaret changing to a nightclub at about midnight, rollicking along until dawn in defiance of the liquor laws. Which is no big deal; most nightside places wink at those kind of regulations. Cash changes hands, and the authorities wink, too. Of course, the cash mostly goes toward a hunter’s salary. The municipal check every month, in fact.

I think that’s called irony .

Instead of the stuffed cats and opium den vibe Shen An Dua had gone for, the Folly’s décor was choke-a-baroque French bordello, with a side of lace and fringe.

It was just before midnight, so the cabaret was winding down. A female Trader in a painted-on latex outfit brought the cat-o’-ninetails up. Fluid spattered under the pulsing red lights. The cat’s tails were wire, studded with barbs. Whatever she was whipping had six misshapen limbs and was the size of a tall man, stretched on an iron rack. It whimpered as the cat came down again with a sound like dissonant wind chimes.

The wires and barbs bit deep. The thing opened a hole at the top of its vague mass and howled. Hellbreed tittered. The Trader pivoted on her stiletto heels, brought the whip back and down again with an expert flick. There was a ripping sound as wet, pulsing flesh parted. A long vertical tear opened in the thing on the rack, and something white showed.

The collected ’breed and Traders stilled, expectantly.

A slender white hand rose. More wet sounds. A thin, curving arm. A knob of a shoulder. The Trader in black vinyl reached forward, the cat dangling in her other hand, and laced her fingers through the questing white hand like a girl grabbing a basket. She leaned back, hip jutting out, and pulled.

More wet tearing sounds, and a pale nakedness rose from the pile of steaming, lacerated flesh. High shallow breasts, wide dark eyes with the flat shine of the dusted, a cherry mouth, long wet strings of hair. Another Trader. Markings that could have been scars, tiger stripes on that dead-white, waxen flesh.

Polite applause. I had my back to the bar, a monstrous thing of mahogany and curlicued iron, silk scarves tied into the grillwork and fluttering upward in merry defiance of gravity. Sorcery and contamination crawled over the cloth, dripping onto the slowly corroding iron. The seaweed scarves flinched away from me, as every piece of silver I carried ran with blue light. Sparks didn’t break free of the metal, but it was close.

The Talisman was still on my chest, like an alert little animal, frozen into immobility. I’d only seen Mikhail use it once or twice, when the situation was desperate. It was like the long, slim shape under its fall of amber silk in the sparring room—not to be touched until the need was dire.

But he’d worn the Eye everywhere.

Talismans are like that. You can’t just leave them in a box. They get irritable, and then you have an even bigger mess to clean up. I’d heard of a hunter in Kansas who had left a Talisman at home for too long and got three tornados in one day to show for it. At the same time he was working a string of disappearances and almost got his ass blown off by a Middle Way adept.

Embarrassing. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t lived that one down yet. Still, considering the Talisman he’d been left with, I didn’t blame him for thinking that maybe he shouldn’t touch the damn thing any more than absolutely necessary.

The bartender was another Trader, tall and big-eyed, broad-shouldered—and with a messy line of vertical stitches closing his lips together. One of Rutger’s little jokes.

Two vodkas, brief stings relished but gone by the time they hit the back of my throat, and I waited. Rutger was up in his office, probably watching the closed-circuit television. I could go up there and drag him out, but what would be the point?

No. I wanted this public, but I also wanted him to come to me. That would make the game mine, on my terms.

Admit it, Jill. You want to beat the shit out of someone. That’s what you’re aching to do, and if you do it in public you might not go over the edge. That edge that gets closer every time you do this.

Philosophizing in the middle of a hellbreed bar is a dangerous occupation. The risk of getting distracted is high. Still, I didn’t jump when he appeared out of thin air with a sound like little voices tittering.

They like doing that.

“Ah, Kismet.” Rutger’s oily tenor, dripping with saccharine. “An honor to see you again. Enjoying the show?”

He was lean, and had a full head and a half on me. His skin was spilled ink. Not human-dark, or ethnic. No, his skin was literally black . It swallowed light with no sheen of human at all on its surface. A pointed chin, wide cheekbones, the slightly yellow cast of his too-sharp-to-be-human teeth, and a fluff of white thistledown hair all competed to add creepiness. The final touch was his irises. A deep throbbing hurtful magenta, the pupils X-shaped. In the crux of the X lurked a leering, sterile point of red-purple light.

He liked velvet coats and ruffled-front shirts, breeches in odd gemlike colors, and high-heeled, shiny-buckled, pointy-toed shoes that should have looked absolutely ridiculous.

On this hellbreed, they looked very sharp. You could just imagine the edges of those shoes, heel or toe, slicing flesh. While he grinned with that V-shaped mouth, showing those shark-row teeth.

“No.” I eyed his bodyguards—slabs of Trader muscle almost too dumb to be breathing. They looked like Frankenstein’s monster crossed with a steroid burner’s dream—even their muscles had lumps of muscle on top, like overyeasted bread.

And they were too far away, hanging back and staring at me with little piggy flat-shining eyes. I could have killed him twice before they got to me.

I bared my teeth, a bright sunny approximation of a smile. My left hand rested on the whip handle, and Rutger’s eyes blinked—first one, then the other. Just like a lizard.

There was a crack of bone and a scream from the stage. It sounded like a peacock’s cry, or a sexless being in fullthroated orgasm. Then it shaded up into agony before it was cut short on a gurgle.

Everyone else let out their breath. One Trader whistled, a keen piercing note that belonged more in a strip club than a murder cabaret.

Some people have no couth.

“Trevor Watling.” The name fell into a well of silence. A single spark cracked from the carved ruby at my throat, and one of the bodyguards flinched. My smile widened just a trifle. It felt unnatural, a layer of paint over my skin.

Rutger shrugged. “Never heard of him.”

I was kind of glad we were going to do this the hard way. He might have been, too, because he thought he was fast enough to jump me.

The corruption in them makes them easy to track. That’s why hunters are human. We can track what we’re akin to.

Quick as they are, a hunter’s quicker. Especially with her reflexes amped up by a hellbreed scar. My boots hit the bar’s shiny surface, and I pivoted slightly on one foot. My other lashed out, steel-shod heel cracking him square on the chin. The whip flashed, too, catching one of the bodyguards across his wide sweat-greased face. Rutger fell in slow motion, black ichor spraying in a wide perfect arc. I cleared leather, had the gun pointed at the next bodyguard, my foot coming back, touching lightly.