Lilith Saintcrow: Redemption Alley

That was Perry on the phone. A galvanic shudder spilled through me, from top to toes. He’s about to start messing with you again, Jill. It figures he would wait until Saul is out of town.

I wanted to call Saul, but he would immediately be able to tell something was wrong. He didn’t need another burden right now. He already sounded too worried. When he could get me on the phone, that is.

I repressed another shiver. I could still smell smoke, my clothes on the floor sending out invisible waves of stink like Pig-Pen in the old Peanuts cartoons.

I should get up, work out, and hit the street.

For a few minutes I lay there, breathing, my eyes full of light. Trying not to follow the inevitable chain of logic.

You know what this means. Perry’s thinking about you.

I wished it didn’t make me feel so unsteady. He’d almost gotten into my head more than once. Almost pushed me over that edge every hunter lives on.

We commit murder on an almost daily basis. It doesn’t matter if it’s hellbreed, Trader, scurf, Middle Way adepts, what-have-you. It’s still killing sentient beings. The fact that most of these sentient beings are kill-crazy predators doesn’t absolve a hunter of responsibility.

The Church, after all, does not admit us into Heaven, even if we’re buried in hallowed ground.

Sometimes I wonder about that. I wonder more and more, the longer I do this sort of work.

Getting that close to the edge is necessary. You can’t kill a hellbreed if you hesitate or flinch. But no matter how close you get to that edge, no matter how you put your little toesies on it and peer over into the howling abyss that lies beyond, you cannot go over. It’s a razor-thin line, but you cannot, ever, go over it.

I had been so close.

Get up, Jill. Work out, and go out and do your job. Let Perry suck eggs in his little hellbreed hole. When he pops back up you’ll deal with him.

It sounded good.

I just wished I believed it.

I rolled up out of bed, taking the knife with me, and got ready to face another night.

I ’d just given the Impala a tune-up, so my baby purred as I took her up into the suburbs, the red fuzzy dice Galina had given me dangling from the mirror. Kutchner’s widow lived in the Cruzada district, nice little houses from the seventies, fenced yards, and neighbors as old as Methuselah—on the right streets. On the wrong streets, the neighbors have bad crack problems that make them look like Methuselah.

Only in the ’burbs do you find this combination. No wonder they need sitcoms to dull the pain.

The wrong streets tend to cluster on higher ground, further away from the artery of the river. Closer to the desert. Mrs. Kutchner lived on the edge, high enough up that security bars on the windows were not just a fashion statement. Still, it was an okay neighborhood, and as the sun slid bloody below the rim of the mountains, I slammed the Impala’s door and eyed the house, a neat little adobe with a trim, if weedy, yard and a chain-link fence. Out here the grass was yellow; people had better things to spend their money on than astronomical water bills.

I leaned against the car door and examined the place. The right-hand neighbors had kids—someone had to play with the toys scattered around their yard. On the other side, a scraggly greenbelt cut through the neighborhood, edging a ditch that would take runoff in flash-flood season. The fence was higher on that side, and so were the weeds.

The blinds were all pulled behind blank windows and vertical iron security bars. The red-painted door looked like a tight-pursed mouth, and the high arched windows gave the street a perpetually surprised glance. The brick-colored roof tiles were still fresh, not bleached by a few high-grade summer scorches.

Now why does this not look right? I pulled my sunglasses off as the sky turned indigo, pink and orange lingering in the west. The mountains glowed, furnace teeth spearing up to catch high thin cumulus clouds. The original seven-veil dance, performed nightly, hold the applause, just throw cash.

Wind came off the desert, smelling of sand and shimmering heat. Oven-warm, drying the sweat along my forehead and tinkling the charms knotted into my hair with red thread. My silver apprentice-ring rested against my left ring finger. I played with it as I watched the house, hairs rising on my nape.

My smart eye—the blue one, the one that can see below the surface of the world—watered a bit as I focused. A pall lay over Kutchner’s house, etheric energy turned thick and bruise-clotted.

There could be a number of reasons for this—grief, or any strong negative emotion over time. A murder or suicide in the recent past—this was listed as Kutchner’s last known address before he ventilated his own skull.

Hellbreed contamination, or even just plain sorcery of the darker variety, will also congest the ether around a place, just like a bruise is congested blood.

Kutchner had been found in a flophouse hotel on the edge of the barrio. Still, brooding about suicide for a while, especially if you’re serious enough to actually do it, can cause your house to get a bit stale, etherically speaking.

I dunno. That’s an awful lot of static.

Well, no time like the present to stick my nose in and find out.

I crossed the street and opened the squeaking chain-link gate. A narrow strip of concrete unreeled to the steps leading to the entryway, and dried husks of yucca flowers rattled in the breeze. The sound was like clicking small bones together in a wooden cup, and my right hand crept for a gun.

Great, Jill. Show up at the widow’s door and scare the crap out of her with a Glock shoved in her face. Monty said he wanted this quiet, you know.

Quiet’s one thing, and disregarding your instincts is another. A hunter who ignores instinct is half dead already. The other half comes when you do something stupid, like not drawing when every nerve in your body screams something’s behind Door Number One, sweetheart!

I drew, keeping the gun low along my side. Leather rustled as I walked up the path, and the dead blossoms rattled, rattled. Like handcuffs. My coat brushed my ankles as I stepped cautiously, the transition to nighttime taking a breath all along the edges of my city. Sometimes I feel that deep breath just after dusk, right under my sternum. It’s like every instrument in an orchestra tuned to the same key and suddenly giving out the deepest tone it’s capable of.

The entryway held pots of cacti, different spiny little things that might have been flowering if they weren’t desiccated enough to be used for tinder. The charms in my hair tinkled as they rubbed against each other. Deep shadows at the end of the roofed entryway moved as I stepped forward, cautiously, and my sensitive nose picked out something it was all too familiar with. A ripe, overwhelming smell.

Under my leather cuff, the scar pulsed hotly. It didn’t seem to be getting any bigger.

Stop thinking like that, Jill. My entire body flushed hot, then cold.

The wind was coming from behind me, or I would have noticed the smell earlier. The door creaked a little bit as the breeze pushed it.

It was open.

Monty swiped at his forehead. Sweat sheened his face. “Jesus,” he said, for the third time.

Usually we only get one Jesus out of him per crime scene.

Jacinta Kutchner’s corpse hung from a white and blue striped nylon rope looped over an exposed ceiling beam creaking slightly as the house settled for the night. She wore a pale blue housedress and one slipper, and had been dead for a while, if the state of the body was any indication. The air conditioning had been turned off sometime in the recent past, and the house was breathlessly hot and stale.