Lilith Saintcrow - The Devil's Right Hand

Then it gave one incredible, crunching flare of pain that ate right through the gray blanket of shock. I sat bolt upright, four inches of steel leaping free of the sheath, disappearing as I shoved the sword back home. There was no enemy to kill here—just one flare after another of deep grinding pain in my shoulder.

What if the mark vanishes? What will I do then? I tried to focus on my breathing, deep and serene.

The trouble was, I felt less than serene. My entire body ached for Japhrimel. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep; in fact, I’d probably go insane from lack of rest. I’d survived almost a year without him before, but the bond between us was too established by now. My research, fragmented as it was, told me one thing for sure, I certainly couldn’t break it.

But with a demon’s power, he might be able to.

Will you stop it, Dante? He’ll come back for you. It’s just when we have to worry about.

The pain in my shoulder eased little by little. I tucked my chin, reached up, and pulled my shirt away from my chest. Ropy lines of scarring twisted in the golden-skinned hollow of my shoulder, looking decorative rather than scarlike. They also flushed a deep, angry red.

An amazing, searing bolt of Power hit the mark, spreading down my skin like oil. My hips jerked forward as my head snapped aside and I gasped, suddenly glad there was nobody in the compartment with me. The hovertrain rocked slightly on its cushion, I gulped down stale recycled air, panting. It felt like I’d just slammed a hypo of caffeine-laden aphrodisiac, pleasure spilling and swirling through my veins, tautening my body like a harpstring.

The cuff on my wrist reacted, etched lines suddenly swirling with green light. I tipped my left hand over and stared at the design, fascinated, as the lines moved on the metal, shaping themselves into patterns I could almost recognize. They looked like demon glyphs, mutating and twisting, as beautiful as they were alien—and as beautiful as their language was hurtful.

What’s it doing? I probed at it delicately with my nonphysical senses, felt nothing. Was it just a decoration, a pretty but useless thing? If it kept glowing I was going to have problems—it would be hard to hide.

I tipped into a half-trance, looking at the colored lines sway and slide over the metal’s surface, still probing at it. For all magickal intents and purposes, it was invisible. That in itself was strange, as most things have a psychic “echo” of one kind or another.

The Power continued pulsing down my skin, each successive wave deeper and warmer. It was nice, I supposed—but why ? Was Japhrimel reaching for his mark on my skin, trying to locate me? Did that mean he was out of Hell and feeling frisky?

I will always come for you.

Was he looking for me? I hoped like hell he was. But staying one step ahead of demon assassins might also make it hard for him to find me.

This drowsy, dreamy thought occurred to me as I stared at the cuff’s little lightshow. I blinked.

When I looked again, the lines were frozen into a single symbol.

Hegethusz , one of the Nine Canons. Shaped like a backward-leaning angular H with a slash through it, a simple stark rune of a simple stark nature.

The Rune of Danger.

There was only one door. I rocked up to my feet, reached it in two steps and slid it aside, pressing the lock-lever. Any transport employee would have the keycode for the outside lock, so it would be easy to pick out of an unprotected brain. Just one more reason why people feared psions. If you didn’t mind getting a wash of uncoordinated jumbled filth with any usable information, a psion could probably do all the things normals were so afraid of. The thought of the effort it would take to clean out my mind after pickpocketing something from a normal’s head made my skin crawl.

The corridor between the windows on the other side of the train and the blank plasteel walls broken by doors into individual compartments was barely wide enough for an anorexic techna-groupie to get through. I turned my back to the windows—I was fairly sure any incoming fire wouldn’t be coming from there, we were going too fast—and stuffed my sword in the loop on my rig. The corridor was too narrow for swordplay, and if I had to do knifework I didn’t want to do it here.

So it was guns. I slid the two projectile guns out of their holsters. A plasbolt might interact with any reactive paint on the outside of the hovertrain, and I had no desire to see another reaction fire up close. I was glad the train was all but empty. Collateral damage was not something I wanted happening if I could help it. Silly of me to worry—demons were sneaky, powerful, and not overly concerned with loss of human life. I was already playing under a handicap and worrying about casualties would make it worse.

I edged down the train toward the back, one gun on either side, my arms stretched out. If any normals came out I was going to look silly—and if anything else showed up I would shoot it. Please don’t let anyone out. Let them all stay in their compartments. If I have to shoot please don’t let me hit anyone innocent, Anubis witness my plea, please don’t let me hit anyone.

The mark on my shoulder pulsed again, another soft wave of Power sliding down my skin, burrowing in toward my bones. Why? What was happening?

I couldn’t afford to holster a gun and reach up to touch the mark. If he could track me through the scar, could another demon do so too? I shone through the ambient landscape of Power like a demon myself, but without the heavy-duty shielding Japhrimel carried. Stuck between two worlds, too strong for human psions and too weak to combat demons, I was just powerful enough to be visible and not powerful enough to protect myself if a serious demon came gunning for me. And this was the second attack in twelve hours.

I was really racking up the score in this gravball game.

My feet shuffling soundlessly, I covered both ends of the train, looking back and forth, wishing I had eyestalks like the Chery Family bodyguards were all augmented with. It would have been good to be able to see both ways at once.

I felt it, then. A quick fluttering brush against my shields, retreating almost as soon as it occurred. Training took over, clamped down on my hindbrain as adrenaline flooded my system. Too much adrenal juice and I’d be a jittery mess. Other trained mental reflexes locked down the direction, complex metaphysical calculations and intuition all slicing in an arc that pinpointed the location.

That smell again—ice-cold moonlight, wet ratfur—assaulted my nostrils. The thing that had thrown my tracker and disappeared—or something that smelled like it—was now on the train. Probably just appearing out of thin air, the way demons had a nasty habit of doing that according to the demonology texts. Especially the Lesser and Low Flights. The Greater Flight liked more dramatic entrances.

At least some of my grueling, piecemeal demonology research was now useful. I knew that some demons could send the Lesser or Low Flight of Hell to do their bidding in the human world. If the demon had enough Power… or if the demon was given permission by Lucifer.

Lucifer’s permission was invoked before every conjuration a Magi solitary or circle attempted to bring a demon through, and I got the idea from Japhrimel that there was a bureaucracy in place to handle the requests. Since Magi were traditionally so jealous of the methods they found to weaken the walls between the world and Hell to get their messages through, it sometimes it took years for the proper method to be found to reach a demon one could control or make a familiar. No Magi ever attempted to contact more than the very lowest echelons of the Lesser Flight. If a Greater Flight demon showed up in a Magi’s conjuring circle, the practitioner was either especially lucky or incredibly painfully doomed.