Lilith Saintcrow - Redemption Alley

Burn, someone whispered inside my head. Burn it all. And this last voice sent me scurrying, trying to shake the yellow hellfire away from my hand like hot grease, because it was Perry’s voice, and I knew that for once I was going to do exactly what it said.

Smoke rose in a huge black smudge, a beacon underlit with bright yellow leaping flame. I shot the last mewling, crawling, burned-black thing skittering in the ashes in its approximation of a head. My gorge rose again, pointlessly, receded with a sound like a choking-dead laugh. The hangars were burning, sharp guncracks of explosions sending flaming debris arcing across the runway.

The entire place looked like a bomb had hit it, except the last building. The sun hung low in the west, a gigantic bloody eye. Someone has to have noticed this by now. A tired sound escaped my lips, sounding suspiciously like a giggle.

The only building I’d left almost untouched was the southerly new one. The Trader said the evocation was due in a week, and a glance inside the kicked-in door had shown me a fresh concrete floor with a pentagram carved deep—and it was definitely a penta gram, not a penta cle— inside a circle and square, candles ranked on fluted iron holders, and the reek of hellbreed so strong and thick it almost knocked me over despite all the varied and wonderful stenches that are a hunter’s life.

The hellfire, burning steadily on my fingertips now, running from the scar like greasepaint, had turned green at its tips. Most sorcerous flame works on a spectrum, and I shouldn’t have been able to produce more than red flame tinged at the edges with a little orange.

Instead, I was cycling up through the spectrum. I’d seen Perry produce blue hellfire once or twice, and it made me wonder. How much of this could he feel, sitting in his office in the Monde? Was he curious about what I was doing? Was I using up all my stock of preternatural power in this one futile gesture?

If I was, I’d cross that bridge when I came to it. There were more immediate problems to solve. They have a backup somewhere. They would be stupid not to. Or this is a backup.

Still, the statement I was making might make any hellbreed think twice before visiting my town. Even the ones still burning in Hell’s embrace.

Even one who had killed my teacher’s teacher? Wasn’t that the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question? If they released Dream—drug, bioweapon, whatever it was—on my city as this Argoth climbed free of Hell, the massive suffering would be a huge banquet. It would feed him, and with that sort of energetic jolt he’d become a very serious proposition indeed.

And I wasn’t a Jack Karma, capable of containing that sort of thing. Not even close. Not even with Perry’s scar on my arm—a scar that might turn into a liability if Perry was ordered by a much stronger hellbreed to Do Something About Me.

Get cracking, Jill. There’s work to do.

In the center of the pentagram the altar stood, a chunk of wood probably from a hangman’s tree under draped black satin stiff with noisome fluids. Various implements, hissing with malice, scattered over the altar’s surface. I took them all in with a glance, shaking my hand. The hellfire didn’t want to go away. It kept popping and hissing, chortling at me, drawing strength from the contagion in the air.

Each piece of silver I wore spat blue sparks. I shut my eyes, my smart eye piercing the meat of my eyelid to show me the shape of things under the surface of the world. The evocation was indeed very close to being finished. Had this continued, on some night under a dark moon the walls between the physical plane and Hell’s screaming, shifting flames would have gapped for just the tiniest moment, and something could have slipped through, not just as a bad dream or a walking shade like an arkeus, only able to coalesce into physical form when someone bargained with it and gave it a toehold.

No, something real would step through. It only took a moment, a knife’s-edge worth of time. And what would a creature like Argoth want with my town? Revenge on a hunter of Karma’s lineage? Something coincidental? A darker purpose?

Always assuming Perry was telling the truth and it was Argoth waiting to come through.

If it wasn’t that hellbreed in specific, it was probably one just as bad. And its corruption would spread until burned out, fueled by the suffering of my people. My civilians. My city.

Not in my city.

The sharp clarity of my rage was comforting, but I couldn’t stay there. It took a long while, me wrestling with the scar, a battle of wills that ended with sweat breaking out all over my body and my eyes snapping open to see that darkness had gathered in the corners. A dry lion’s cough of an explosion sounded. Did I really do all that?

I held up my right hand.

In the uncertain light, the puckered lip-print on my inner wrist was just the same. There was no mark on my skin of the power I’d pulled through it. It felt flushed, obscenely full, pulsing in time with my heartbeat.

“God,” I whispered. Blue sparks hissed.

The banefire came slowly, whispering around my fingers in wisps, almost drowned by the pressure of hellbreed contamination in the ether. It tingled, like a numb limb right before the pain of waking up starts.

The prayer rose inside my head. Thou who hast… It circled the rage, came back. Thou Who hast given me to fight evil, protect me; keep me from harm. The prayer, skipped, skidded, and returned to the most important part. “O my Lord God,” I whispered, “do not forsake me when I face Hell’s legions.” My voice cracked; I licked my dry lips. From some deep place inside me the idea of calm rose, and I grabbed for it with both mental hands. The last sentence fell into a well of silence. “In Thy name and with Thy blessing, I go forth to cleanse the night.”

I opened my eyes.

Oily, pale-blue banefire wreathed my hand in living flame, whispering to itself, a cleaner sound than hellfire’s greasy chuckling. It boiled up, sheathing my skin, and I threw it at the altar with every ounce of hellbreed strength my right arm possessed.

It hit, dimmed, and roared up, a sheet of avid blue flame crawling over cursed implements and scouring the black satin. The curved knife, the twisted claw of no animal that crawled under the sun, the chalice full of noisome, clotted scum, other things that had no other purpose but to hurt and wreak havoc—all wrinkling like paper in a flame, the banefire gathering strength as I stumbled back on legs as weak and rubbery as noodles, hit my shoulder on the wrecked door, and almost went down in a heap out in the dust beyond.

Jill, you’re in bad shape.

I let out a hard jagged sound. Better shape than those… things … in the east building. If hunters were allowed to go to Confession and Communion I might have turned a priest’s hair white, sharing the horror.

It was worse because they’d been human once, and worse even than scurf because of the—

My mind reeled violently away from the thought. There are only two or three things in my life as a hunter that have that effect—memories so terrible the fabric of the brain itself refuses to hold them, human comprehension shying away.

Good, you can’t remember. Which means it’s over. Which means you need to get on your fucking feet and finish the rest of this job. Monty. Theron. Carp. They’re all in danger, and it’s up to you. So quit your bitchmoaning and figure out how you’re going to get the hell back to your city.

I came back to myself on my knees in the dust with my head down, hair hanging in dark strings starred with blue-sparking silver, and the hissing of banefire behind me underlying the crackle of other flame. If anybody was giving out prizes for laying waste, I’d have won one. The entire airfield looked like a picture of an artillery attack I’d seen in an old magazine. Every hangar was a roaring shell, and the new buildings were burning merrily, mostly with orange and yellow flame.