Lilith Saintcrow - Hunter's Prayer

But I’d murdered, hadn’t I? Eleven pimps. Eleven men, never mind that they’d given me the information I needed. Never mind that the world was probably better off without them.

Cogs in a wheel, bitch. The world is not better off without them. More will rise to take their place.

And with every pimp I killed I bought some hooker on a corner a little breathing room. Not much, not ever enough—but some.

It was worth it.

I sagged against the altar’s cold unforgiving glass at my back. The chains clashed. The golden marks on the ceiling were twisting madly now, running with the black crackling lightning of Chaldean sorcery.

Another gurgle. Guilt slammed through me, a hot steamy nauseous guilt. I had fallen right into the trap, and people were dying for it. Innocent people.

I tilted my head over, tucking my chin, and looked.

Black lightning ate the body whole once the blood had been spilled. Where there had been a pale human form, veined in black fire, now there was nothing; the etheric discharge of death, visible through my blue eye, was trapped and funneled, the soul tearing itself free and disappearing, the etheric strings holding it to the body snapped. Cleanly severed. The wendigo’s violence and reek had covered up the signs of theft on the other bodies. How many of them? How much death was the blood-haired bitch carrying?

No wonder she’s fucking mad, I thought, and it was like a slap of freezing water.

They dragged another drugged naked form in, and ice slammed through me. Pure, clean, marvelous ice, the little click as I disconnected again, taking off, rising. Becoming that other person, the Jill Kismet who could go from house to house like the Angel of Death, sparing and striking according to her will.

The girl had long sandy hair, and was drugged out of her mind. She didn’t struggle, but suddenly it wasn’t her I was seeing. It was another girl, with long brown hair and a severely bruised face, whose ankles were thin and bruised too, who flinched when I yelled.

Oh, dear God. I knew it wasn’t Cecilia; she was with Avery. Or at least, so I hoped.

But goddammit, the light wasn’t good, and when I looked at the pale body they bent back over the curved altar all I could see was Cecilia’s face. The face of a tired young hooker who had once been a bright needy little girl, who had escaped from Hell between four walls of a home and found a different hell out in the cold world, in backseats and hotel rooms and up against walls and wherever a dark corner could be found and sometimes, not even then.

And under Cecilia’s face, I saw another face. A face of a girl with dark hair and brown eyes, a very intelligent but terribly crippled child who had grown up too fast.

She’s dead, Jill. The only one left alive is you. She went into Hell and you came back.

I struggled, but silently. Pulled. Pulled.

I pulled against the chains, my breath coming out in a long huuuuuungh! of effort, veins popping out and muscles protesting. The scar turned white-hot, agony bolting up my arm, and I heard a slight groan of overstressed metal.

I was still looking when they tipped her head back, the vulnerable curve of her throat glaring-white in the smoky dimness. More incense had been thrown on the braziers. The air crackled with humming etheric force, the thick golden wires whispering now as they remade themselves, livid lurid golden fire writhing and undulating through granite floor and concrete vault.

They use curved knives, the Sorrows. Curved black obsidian blades, with hammered gold in the blood groove.

I screamed as the knife descended, my cry taking on physical shape and smashing through the incense smoke, my back arching as if in the throes of orgasm. I convulsed with every iota of strength, mental, physical, everything, straining, tearing at the prison of metal around my wrists. My left shoulder popped, tendons savagely stretched, almost dislocating itself, and I heard a scream of metal stretching and stone bubbling hot. Heat blasted up, reflecting from the altar’s surface and careering across the cold vault in a gunpowder flash.

Inez Germaine Ayasha laughed, and she pronounced the Word in Chaldean that set loose the third sequence and tore the three circles into screaming life.

Then everything broke loose.

I think I passed out. At least momentarily. But that moment contained a lifetime.

Darkness enfolded me, smothered me, pressed down deep upon me. A bulging pressed obscenely against the fabric of the physical world. Spacetime curving, the black curved mirror slanting, a pregnant hollow of cancerous pus as something, sensing its time was near, strained to be let out. Strained to rip through etheric and physical reality, strained to unzip the barrier of the world and step through. There had been much work to prepare for this, much toil and suffering, and there was a body ripe for the taking. A matrix of probabilities meshed, caught, turned… and tipped.

It dropped like a baby’s head into the waiting hollow of the pelvis, descending preparatory to labor. The mother draws a deep breath, relieved for the moment, unconscious that around the corner lies the straining of birth.

And then, it pushed.

Screaming, torn past rationality, an animal shriek as if my guts were ripping out on glassy sharp claws. Screaming as if the veil had been torn away and I’d seen the naked face of existence leering down at me.

Maybe I had.

The howl was an animal’s, yet it shaped words, a language that had not been spoken since the War between the Chaldean gods and the Imdárak, the Lords of the Trees. The Imdárak were gone, their victory in banishing the Chaldeans from this plane Pyrrhic in the extreme, something only whispered faintly of between hunters, passed down in the dead of night as part of a hunter’s inheritance. Yet I screamed aloud in that language, tearing my vocal cords until the screaming trailed off in a long rasping gurgle as if my throat was cut.

It bore down on me. An immense weight, seeking to get in, to crush me and fill me, boiling wine trying to shatter the cup it was poured into. Or lava, forcing its way through a brittle stony crust. Forcing its way into me, to possess me.

Something in me resisted. A hard piece of tinfoil between the teeth, a small germ of irritation, a pinprick to a creature this mighty. Every exorcism I’d ever done—had it felt like this to the victims? Locks smashed, drawers pulled out, mental furniture reduced to matchsticks, personality shredded, breaking, the essence that was me stretching in a thin film over something too horrible to be described, like the shape of a monster under a blanket that is so instantly wrong you know it cannot be human.

Is nothing even close to human.

Then, pain. Fresh pain, a slice straight through the middle of me. A fist curled in my hair and yanked, metal snapping at my wrists and ankles, and I spilled off the altar in a boneless heap, my head hitting granite with skullcracking force. The gurgle died in my throat, giving way to a whimper.

Like a beaten dog, whining in the back of its throat.

“No,” Perry’s almost-familiar voice said, and the scar on my wrist suddenly turned blowtorch-hot again under the metal of the broken cuffs. And every pain in the world was suddenly a thin imitation of this agony, excruciating because it was physical and yet a relief because it wasn’t the soul-destroying violation of my innermost self.

“She is mine, ” the voice continued, calmly but with a terrible weight of anger. “Signed, sealed, and witnessed, Elder. She is not for you.”

The world stopped on its axis, though I could now hear other sounds. Crimson sparks danced behind my eyes, and I heard clashing, screams, and the coughing roar of a Were in battle-fury. Saul? My dazed brain staggered.