Lilith Saintcrow - Hunter's Prayer

The thing spoke again, a long string of those horrible, horrible alien sounds. I cowered, chains clashing as I clapped my numb hands over my bleeding ears and huddled against something solid. Something absurdly comforting, twin hardnesses poking into my ribs, as if I was at the foot of a statue. I choked on blood and bile, drew in a shuddering breath, and the scar turned to liquid on my arm. Pleasant oiled honey, sliding under my skin. Soothing.

OhGodplease let it be over, please let it be over. I sobbed without restraint, huddling down and making myself as small as I could.

“Let’s ask her, shall we?” Perry’s voice turned cheerful, razor-edged with sheer goodwill, and I flinched. I knew that tone. I knew that voice, though I had never heard it unveiled in its full aching power before. “I think she likes me better. But then, I’m handsomer.”

More screams, more sounds of bloodshed, the steady roar of an enraged Were doubling, trebling. How many were there? Saul? Is that you? Oh, God. God help me.

It was my first coherent thought, and I welcomed it, even as I clung to someone’s feet. My eyes cleared, bit by bit. The air was full of ambergris, clove, copal, and a horrid, foul, rotting stench; a smell so alien the brain shuddered each time it drifted across the nasal receptors. Oh, God. God, thank you. Thank you.

It spoke again, that sound tearing at the world. With it, quiet seemed to envelop us, the choking quiet of a nuclear winter.

A laugh like a flaming steel sword to the heart. “How very crass, Elder. Wherever you have been, you have not learned manners. No wonder they banished you. Did you not hear me the first time? I said no. This one is mine. See?”

The scar bloomed hotly again, and I moaned against his feet. Spilled over onto my back, my body not obeying me but I had to look, had to see. He was hellbreed, and he was dangerous, but he was better than that… that thing.

Perry stood, his hands in his gray trouser pockets, immaculate as always. There was an angry red healing mark on his forehead, perfectly placed, and his blue eyes blazed with holocaust flame over the indigo spreading through the whites like a cobra’s hood. I was looking from beneath, from the floor, so he seemed taller than he should have, and thinner, and his face was full of a wasted light like the dying of the sun on a knife-cold winter day. His pale hair had become a halo, and a breeze touched my face, choking with the smell of dusty feathers and spoiled, rotten honey. I heard buzzing—wasps? angry hornets? flies? — and couldn’t tell where it came from. He stood straight and slim as a sword, and his face was no longer bland but terribly, sharply beautiful.

Beautiful in the same way a mushroom cloud or the sterile white light of reaction is beautiful. A devouring beauty.

Above the altar, darkness pulsed. Only it wasn’t darkness. It was like the wendigo, shapes running like ink on wet paper. Shapes that were so completely divorced from the geometry of our normal space that I tried to throw up again, seeing them twist and try to leap free.

If that carnivorous thing broke through…

It spoke very softly, the words still dimpling and scoring the fabric of reality. But it was fading, drawing away like the cry of a distant train. It was no less menacing and alien.

Perry shrugged. It was a marvel of Gallic fluidity, that shrug, expressing resignation and uncaring disinterest. “Perhaps. But you are there, and I am here, and I own this. ” His foot moved slightly, nudging my hip now since I had turned onto my back. The scar boiled with spiked honey, pleasure creeping up my arm and spilling down my chest. Soothing, calming. I heard my own shapeless, helpless moan again.

Just like one of the drugged victims they had slit open.

Oh, God. God help me.

The thing replied with a thick burping chuckle, like poisonous mud boiling. I twitched against the sound, the raw places inside my head stinging under another salted lash.

“Empty threats bore me, Elder. Go contemplate cold eternity elsewhere. It is our time now.”

Reality closed together like a camera lens shutter, and I convulsed as it tried to drag me, but Perry’s foot came down on the skein of my hair, nailing me in place with a jolt. A soon as the telescoping hole closed I shuddered again, strength spilling back into my bones.

But not enough. Nowhere near enough.

Perry glanced over his shoulder, gauging the situation. Then he squatted, his left hand dangling, his right reaching down to thread through my hair. There was no silver for him to avoid. He made a fist, pulling my head up. My throat curved helpless, and the cold floor scorched my hip, my back, my buttocks, my heels. “Look at this,” he said softly. “My poor darling.”

His blue eyes burned into my brain, even as the scar writhed with curdled pleasure. “Here.” A jolt smashed through me, as if I was in cardiac arrest and had defib applied. I cried out, weakly, the cuffs on my ankles and wrists chiming and clattering against the floor.

Just like a newborn screaming.

“My poor, poor Kiss,” he whispered. “Look at this mess.”

I was getting very tired of him saying that. I couldn’t help myself. “Saul,” I whispered in reply.

Perry’s face didn’t change, but I flinched nonetheless. “Oh, stop it.” He sounded annoyed. “You’ll tire of him soon enough. Can you stand?”

I’ll sure as hell give it a try. “No… dancing,” I managed, in a thick choked voice sounding not at all like myself. “For a… while.”

He actually laughed, a chilling, happy little chuckle. “Brave to the last. Stand, I’ll help.”

The growling of Weres had subsided. Now I heard only moans and the soft low thunder of still-angry shapeshifters; the battle was evidently won. He slid his arm behind my shoulders and picked me up as if I weighed less than nothing. I’m tall for a girl, and muscular, but he handled me as if I was made of straw.

Or spun glass.

“One moment.” His fingers curled around the metal of the cuff over my right wrist, sank in and twisted. He tore the metal as if it was cardboard, freeing my hand. Then he closed his warm fingers over my wrist, the scar pulsing in his palm. My head lolled, resting against his shoulder. “There. Isn’t that better?” The fabric of his suit was expensive, rich, soothing against my cheek, and I felt muscle flicker underneath as he stroked my hair. Warmth spilled through me, strength like wine flooding through my abused flesh. Unhealthy strength, like the jitter of a drug smashing through my system—but I’d take it.

Perry sighed. “Just relax.”

Delicious, wonderful safety spilled down my skin. “Saul,” I whispered against Perry’s suit.

“The cat is in fine form, little one. No worries. We have averted a little unpleasantness. I think we shall renegotiate your visits to me, no? Come. Walk. You can walk.”

“Ch-chains—” I was trying to tell him to take the other cuffs off.

“Let them be a reminder,” he replied, inexorably. “You should have listened to me, Kiss. You’ve racked up a heavy debt.”

“Fucking… romantic.” Humor would help, I decided. My brain shivered, jagging between the unreality of the Chaldean obscenity straining to break through into our world and the sanity of a normal day.

Normal for a hunter, maybe.

“I’ve never been accused of romanticism before.” Perry’s fingers dug into my upper arm as he steadied me. Just short of bruising.

Broken bleeding husks in velvet robes lay scattered, the fluid golden wires of the Nine Seals and the three circles pale and still, useless. There was a blackened path—Perry’s passage through the circles and the pentagram, breaking into the center, slashing through the careful work Inez had done.