Lilith Saintcrow: Redemption Alley

The body will do what the will dictates, yes. I learned that in my first year of training. But sometimes, even the will isn’t enough to get the body up off the floor, when you’ve forced flesh past the point of no return. Even a berserker will eventually get tired.

Shen landed on me, tentacles swarming, thick black gore slicking her right cheek. Probing, flexible hairy pseudo-fingers bit hard, helped along by tiny vicious suckers, each rimmed with sharp cartilaginous protrusions resembling teeth. Peeked up the skirt of destiny, did we? the merry voice of impending doom snarled inside my head. About to pay for it, Jill. And pay for it big.

Slim strong human-shaped fingers tightened around my throat, and if my cervical spine hadn’t been hellbreed-reinforced, my neck would have snapped. I kicked, my knee sinking into fleshy pulsing warmth nesting under her kimono and finding precious little bone to bounce off. My abraded wrists swarmed with tentacles, and she exhaled sicksweet foulness in my face, squeezing harder now, black ichor dripping from her pointed chin and splashing my face.

I spat, defiant to the last, and heaved up. No dice. She had too much leverage. Judo doesn’t teach you how to fight off tentacles, goddammit.

The gun roared again.

The unwounded half of Shen’s head disintegrated. Silver grain loaded in hollowpoints will do that. Black ichor spattered my face, stinking as it rotted.

The tentacles spasmed. Her hands bit in once more, terribly, but I wriggled free. My own fingers tore hers away, and I took in a gasping, whooping breath.

Irene was sobbing. The Trader whose larynx I’d crushed was suffocating to death, thrashing on the floor, a knifehilt protruding from his chest. Someone else was dying in leaps and spasms. I scrabbled through the crowded space, noticing for the first time that I was bleeding. Someone had clawed me in the side, my wrists were wet and dripping, my legs ached savagely, and I was blinking away both crusted and fresh blood. Not to mention the hellbreed-stinking gore dumped all over me.

There was the click of a half-depressed trigger, and I looked up. Ohshit.

But Irene stood, straddle-legged, over the Puerto Rican Trader. “Bobby,” she whispered, and pulled the trigger. I tried not to flinch. “You should have listened to me.” She let out a sound like a choked sob, and again the gun spoke.

Silence descended. There was a smear of thick crimson beginning near the ceiling, on the wall I’d been tied up behind. It looked about the size of an adult male, as if a man-sized canvas bag of blood had been flung at the wall and slid down, sopping-wet.

I gained my feet in a convulsive movement. The entire goddamn place was only about ten by ten, too small a space for the carnage it held. Pipes clustered at the far end. The naked, blood-spattered bulb swung in ever-decreasing arcs.

Irene hunched over something near the wall. The gun dangled limply in her hand. “Fax,” she whispered.

I coughed, deep and racking. Fax wasn’t going to mix any more bioweapons for anyone. Pretty much every bone in his body was broken, and the odd shape of his head meant his skull was crushed. Thin red blood, only a little tainted with hellbreed black, slicked his face and spattered his now-grimy lab coat.

I tried to feel something other than hot nasty satisfaction. Got what you deserved. Bile whipped the back of my throat as the thought of his “subjects” crawled under the surface of my consciousness, refusing to surface fully.

Thank God for small mercies. It wasn’t much, but I’d take it.

I found my other guns near the ruins of what looked like a wooden chair. It had been smashed to splinters, and it looked like the chair Winchell had been beaten in.

Shen must have thought I’d be easy to take out. My, isn’t this tying up nicely. Three guns, Irene had the fourth, and I had a bead on her even while my left hand picked up the two leftover Glocks and holstered them independently of me.

I coughed again, tasted blood and the bitterness of exhaustion. My neck was going to be bruised.

“Fax,” Irene whispered again. “Oh, God.”

I checked all the other bodies. They were twitch-rotting, fast, contagion spreading through tissues and loosing a powerful stench into the air. I kept the gun trained on Irene.

Dead and rotting meant they were no threat. But God, it smelled. If there’s anything I hate about my job, it’s the varied odors of rot and corruption.

Not to mention almost getting killed on a regular basis. Or getting lied to so frequently I barely even trust myself anymore.

Or how even a job that ties itself up can feel almost like a failure. I’d been caught assuming too often on this one, and how many people could have died if I hadn’t been lucky? Or if I’d been just, simply, too late and a high-class hellbreed had stepped through to sit down and have himself a feast?

I took two steps forward, over the tangled ruin of a body. Fury worked its way up inside me, I blinked more blood out of my eyes.

Irene didn’t move, crouched on her high heels, her knees splayed. The green tint to her skin was pronounced under the bloodspattered light.

“What did you do to Galina?” I husked.

“I threatened to shoot the detective unless she let me go.” Her slim fingers opened. The gun clattered, came to rest right next to Fairfax’s dead, crushed hand. “Goddammit.”

“You’re playing out of your league.” The gun barrel met the back of her head, through that blood-colored hair. She didn’t move. “Who else is in on this? Harvill, Shen, who else?”

“They’re mostly dead.” The words were colored with a sob, but I didn’t miss her shifting her weight slightly, very slightly. She froze when I shoved the gun against her skull again, harder. “Fax and I, we were trying to fix it, once we realized what they were planning. Bernardino killed the widow and I took care of Winchell, but we didn’t find the ledgers. We couldn’t pressure Harvill without them. Shen sold me to Bernardino to keep him quiet, he was a pile of filth. I enjoyed killing him, but he didn’t have the ledgers and it all went… Fax. He was…”

Yeah, you were trying to fix it, and blackmail a few people in the process. A nice little nest egg, there for the taking, but Bernie had plans of his own. Enough double-crosses to make everyone dizzy, all of you little fucking rats scurrying once the lights turned on.

It might have been funny if it hadn’t been so pathetic. Or if so many people hadn’t died, used like Kleenex and discarded without a thought. And now she was sniveling over her dead bioweapon-making boyfriend. I’ll bet it never even occurred to you to look in the garage, either. Even with the car you arrived in sitting in there. “What other higher-ups were involved? Who, goddammit?”

She kept talking. Maybe she thought that if she kept going, she’d find a way out of the hole. Or maybe it didn’t matter to her now. “Just Shen. She wanted to ingratiate herself with the big guy, he wanted a way through, into this city. She thought the owner of the Monde knew and sent you to blackmail her so he could get in first.”

Perry? Evoking Argoth? I don’t know, he likes being the biggest fish in town too much. I cleared my aching throat. “Was there a backup for the evocation?”

“I don’t think so. Shen was always going out to the airfield, every dark moon for six months. It was the only time I was allowed to see Fax.” Her voice broke again. But the calculation was back in it, the slightest hesitation masquerading as sorrow.

When you’ve spent a lifetime listening for that hesitation, it blares like a bullhorn.