Hunter's Prayer (7 page)

“It is the spear he blessed with his blood when the citizens of a small town were overwhelmed with the hordes of Hell. He didn’t use it; Marcus Silvacus used it.” Father Rourke’s flabby cheeks quivered, and he was pale too. I couldn’t tell if I was smelling the stink of a lie on him, or the reek of fear.

I am going to have to check that out. As far as I knew, Marcus Silvacus never met Saint Anthony, and Saint Anthony didn’t have a fucking spear.
I could feel my teeth grind together. I tipped my head back, my jaw working.

“I’m sorry, Guillermo. But you took a vow.” For once, Rourke’s tone wasn’t blustering.

“An artifact here, and it somehow slipped your mind to tell me? This isn’t looking good, Gui. Years and years I’ve trusted you, and I’ve done the Church’s dirty work peeling demons out of people before I was even fully trained.
This
is how you repay me?”

“The Sorrow said he was fleeing,” Saul’s voice cut across mine. “It might be unrelated.”

I wasn’t mollified, but he did have a point. “Still, that’s something I needed to know.”

“Agreed.” His hand curled around my shoulder. “It stinks of death in here. And we have work to do.”

Damn the man. He was right again.

I shook out my right hand, my fingers popping as tendons loosened. “All right.” I sounded strange even to myself. “Fine. But I won’t forget this, Guillermo.”
I will not ever forget this.

“I would have told you everything, Jillian. When I was released from my vow.” Gui slumped against the wall, rubbing his throat, though I hadn’t held him by anything than his cassock. “I swear it, I would have. I didn’t think the two were connected, and I can’t speak of it.”

I waved it away. The charms tinkled in my hair, uneasily. “Get that cleaned up. And give him a decent burial; he was only a kid.”

“Not in consecra—” Rourke stopped when my eyes rested on him. I felt my face harden. My blue eye began to burn, and I knew it was glowing, a single pinprick of red in the center of my pupil.

“Give him his last rites,” I said, very softly and distinctly. “If indulgence is required,
Father,
I’ll pay. But for God’s sake bury him kindly.”

I left it at that. And for once, so did he.

Saul drove. I wasn’t in the mood. We didn’t speak on the way home. As soon as I swept the warehouse and determined it was safe I headed for the phone. Which began to ring as soon as I got within three feet of it.

I hooked it up. “This better be good news.”

“Hello to you too.” Avery sounded serious, as usual. “Jill, there’s a problem.”

Oh, Christ. Not another one.
“The Trader I just brought in?”

A short, unamused laugh drifted through the phone line. Avery was a professional exorcist, not a hunter like me. It was his job to exorcise the Traders I brought in, just like it was Eva, Benito, and Wallace’s job to handle other straight exorcisms in my city and refer the extraordinary ones to me. “No, he was an easy rip-and-stuff. Screamed like a damned soul, though. He’s on meds. No, the problem’s different. I wanted to talk to you about it.”

I considered this. “Micky’s? At—” I glanced at the clock, juggled his probable freedom from work. “Eleven?”

He agreed immediately. “Sounds good, I’ll buy you a beer. Um …”

“Um, what?” I glanced over my shoulder as Saul began rummaging in the kitchen. He was probably hungry; I was too. The light shone mellow off his long red-black hair, silver glinting against the strands; his cheeks looked a little pale without the paint. He glanced up, probably feeling my eyes, and gave me a half-smile that made my legs feel decidedly mushy.

“Will Saul be there?”

What?
“Of course he will. He’s my partner.”
And a damn fine one, too.

“I just … well, yeah. Bring him. Sorry. Look, eleven o’clock. See you then.”

I hung up feeling even more unsettled, and that was rare. Avery didn’t have anything against Weres.

Not that I knew of, anyway. Nothing out of the ordinary.

I dialed Andy’s number from memory and got his answering machine, left a message. The heavenly odor of sauteed onions tiptoed to my nose, and that meant steak.
Bless Weres and their domesticity.

I stared at the phone after laying it back in the charger, my eyebrows drawing together. Then I picked it up again, and dialed another number from memory.

“Hutchinson’s Books, Used and Rare.” This was a slightly nasal, wheezing voice; I had to bite back a laugh.

“Hutch, it’s Jill.”

He actually spluttered. “Oh good Christ, what
now?
”

“Relax, baby. I just need to use the back room. Want to do some research for me?”

“I’d rather gouge my own eyes out.” He was serious. Wise man.

“That makes you much more intelligent than a number of people I know. Listen, scour for everything you can find about the Sorrows. Brush up your ceremonial Chaldean and find me every mention of something called a
chutsharak.
”

“Zuphtarak?” He mangled the word. I could almost hear his teeth chattering. Cute, nervous Hutch was not cut out for hunter’s work, but he was hell on wheels when it came to digging through dusty old tomes; which Hutchinson’s Books held as a hunter’s library in return for a number of very nice tax breaks that kept it afloat.

Hey, hunters believe in supporting local indie bookstores.

“Chutsharak.”
I spelled it for him. “But the
ch
is sometimes
j,
and sometimes—”

“—those goddamn seventeenth-century translations, I know. All right. Fine. You still have your key?”

“Of course I still have my key.”
I am exceedingly unlikely to lose it, Hutch. And anyway, I built those fucking locks. They’ll open for me anytime I want.
“I won’t come by while you’re in. Leave your notes in the usual place.”

“Thank fucking God.”

I snorted. “I thought you liked me, Hutch.”

He gave an unsteady little laugh. I could almost see his hazel eyes behind his glasses and his thin biceps. “You’re hot, yeah. But you’re scary. I’ll work on it.
Chutsharak.
Chaldean. Got it.”

“One more thing.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“Can you look up Saint Anthony’s spear?”

“Saint Anthony didn’t have a—”

“I didn’t think so either. But check it. And check to see if there’s
any
connection between Anthony and Marcus Silvacus. Just to be sure.” I rubbed at the bridge of my nose, feeling a headache beginning. Just my luck. But why would Rourke lie to me? Of course, I wasn’t Catholic anymore, I wasn’t a priest, and I was female; he would probably just confess and be forgiven and not lose any damn sleep over lying to
me.
And if Gui really was under orders not to say anything about an artifact hidden at the seminary, an artifact the Sorrows wanted for some unholy reason, things were getting stickier by the moment.

“Fine.” Hutch said it like I had him by the balls—and not in a good way.

“Thanks, Hutch. I’ll bring you a present.”

“Keep me out of this.”

I laughed, and he hung up. I laid the phone back in its cradle and stared at it, daring it to ring again.

It remained obstinately mute.

“Red-sauce penne with steak, and fresh asparagus.” Saul made his happy sound, a low hum like a purr. “Want some wine?”

“Please.” I rubbed at the back of my neck under my heavy hair. “You’re a good partner, Saul.”

His eyes met mine, he peered under the hanging cabinets. The copper-bottom pans glowed behind him. “Yeah?”

I folded my arms. “Yeah. Avery wants to meet us at Micky’s. And then I’ve got some research to do.”

“Research?”

I know, I know. I don’t like it either.
“Then we’ll come back, and I’m all yours.”

“I like the sound of that. Make yourself useful and open the wine, kitten.”

10

A
very slumped in the booth, tapping his long fingers on the glass-topped table. Directly over him, Humphrey Bogart stared somberly out of a framed print. Curly brown hair fell in Ave’s face, over sad brown eyes; he looked like a handsome little mournful beagle. Despite that, he was quick and ruthless during exorcisms, seeming to come alive only when a particular Possessor or
arkeus
was giving him trouble, or the victim started to thrash. Of all the exorcists I knew, he was the one who came closest to being a hunter, if only because of the sheer nail-biting joy he took in skating the edge of danger.

We are all adrenaline junkies, really. You have to be. Hunting is 95 percent boredom-laced waiting punctuated with the occasional bursts of sheer and total terror. No middle ground.

Ave’s badge hung on a chain around his neck; he had shrugged out of his motorcycle jacket and was staring at his fingertips like he had bad news.

I was really getting a rotten feeling about this.

I slid into the booth, Saul right next to me. “Hey, baby.” I gave a smile, but Ave didn’t grin back. Not even a glimmer of his usual sleepy good humor. “Wow, looks grim.”

Vixen swished her hips up to the table, her sleek brown hair clinging to her head like an otter’s. “Hey.” She plunked down three Fat Tires, her lip lifting as she glared at me, then smiled at Saul. He, as usual, looked supremely unconcerned.

She sighed, turned on her heel, and her tartan skirt ticked back and forth as she switched away with a Were’s grace.

“In heat again, I see,” Saul murmured, and I choked on my first sip of beer, the laugh bubbling up.

Avery didn’t even crack a slight smile. I sighed. “So what’s up, Ave?”

He finally shifted, picking up his beer and tipping a sarcastic salute to Saul. “Hey, furboy.”

“Hey, skinman.” Saul’s tone was even, chill.

“I heard something.” Avery addressed this to me.

“Yeah?” I waited, rolling my next sip of beer around in my mouth. Stifled a small pleasant burp; it tasted of grilled onions. At least I had the memory of dinner to get me through this. Whatever
this
was.

“One of my stoolies; he’s a drunk. But he picks stuff up—it’s amazing. He manages to get around. Anyway, he knows someone who saw something.” Avery produced a white square of paper, held between his fingers like a card trick. “And the worst thing is, I believe him.”

“What did he see?”
And what the fuck does this have to do with anything?
I shifted uneasily, the leather of my pants rubbing uncomfortably against the vinyl seat.

“Guy’s called Robbie the Juicer. He saw them dumping Baby Jewel last night. Black van, no license plate. Said there were four of them, one looked to be a woman, and two men. The last one was … he said it was big, and it stank, and it threw the body like it weighed nothing.”

Huh.
I absorbed this. “Big. And stinky.”

“Yeah. He said it looked like an ape. Like it was
furry.
” He darted a look at Saul. “Could it be a rogue Were? No offense, understand, I just thought I should ask.”

It was a good question, considering what he’d been told. “A rogue Were would hide the bodies,” I said, slowly. The memory of the last rogue to hit Santa Luz was far enough away that I could consider the notion without a gut-clenching burst of slick-palmed fear. “Wouldn’t work with anyone else, that’s why they’re rogue. And wouldn’t eat the organs unless it was starving; they like muscle-meat first. Who is this witness, and where was he?”

“My stoolie said something about a baseball diamond; the witness is homeless and sometimes sleeps in the dugout. He heard the van’s engine and looked out; the van sat there for a while and he decided to go take a look.” He offered the square of white paper. “Here’s his name and vitals, and a list of the places he usually hangs out. He’s scared to death.”

“He should be. This is nothing to mess with.” I took the paper; it was thin and innocent against my fingers. “Thanks, Avery.”
Christ, I bet I’m not going to sleep for a while.
Behind my eyes, the vision of the edge of the park and the baseball diamond flashed, and I cautiously decided it was possible. The dugout was at an angle and it was
extremely
possible someone hidden in there could have seen something. It was just
slightly
possible someone hidden in there could have been unremarked, which was the truly incredible part. Whoever this Robbie Juicer was, he’d probably used up his entire life’s worth of luck.

Avery was decent, after all. He looked up, at my Were. “I’m sorry, Saul. I just—Christ. This thing’s
awful.
There’s talk going around.”

My ears perked. “What kind of talk?”

“Talk of a bounty on Weres. Someone’s saying that this is a rogue Were, and why shouldn’t the rest of them suffer for it? And there’s talk about you too, Jill, that you’re marked and it’s only a matter of time before the damned drag you back to Hell.”

“Marked. By who?”
I’ve been marked all my life, Avery.
But if he was hearing whispers on the nightside, little bits of rumor from the occult shops and not-so-human stoolies that kept on the exorcists’ good side, it could only mean bad trouble.

“I dunno. But you hear shit, you know. Something big is going down, and I can’t get more than whispers.” He hunched his shoulders, looking miserable. “You just be careful. We can’t afford to lose you.
Or
your furry friend there.”

Well, at least that was something. “Guess not.” I bumped Saul with my elbow, but gently. Just to let him know I was there. He was still crowding me, a little closer than usual. Taking comfort in closeness. “We’ve got Sorrows adepts in town, Ave. At least one. I pulled an
utt’huruk
out of a kid the other day and there was a Neophym who gurgled something about
chutsharak
before biting his poison tooth. You know that term?”

“I never was good at that prehistoric shit.” He shook his brown head, curls falling in his eyes. “I thought you didn’t let the Sorrows in.”

“I don’t. When I find their bolthole I’m going to burn them. Just watch yourself. You hear anything that sounds like Chaldean, you
run.
”

“You bet. Hey, be easy on this witness. He’s not bolted too tight, I guess. And he doesn’t want any police static, or I woulda met him and brought him to you.”

Go easy? I’m an easygoing gal.
“That goes without saying.” I lifted my beer bottle and he lifted his, we clinked the glass together. He suddenly looked a lot easier about the whole thing. “I’ll be gentle, I promise.”

“Yeah, right.” His color began to come back. “Sure you will.”

I could almost feel my eyebrow raise. “You’re a cynic, Avery. One day that’s going to catch up to you.” I lifted my beer again, and took a long hard swallow.

It tasted a little more sour than I liked. Or that could have been the taste of bad luck in my mouth.

Instead of research, we hit the street looking for Robbie the Juicer, the nervous witness. It was a cold night, clouds moving in from the river but not fast enough to give us rain before five or six in the morning; the hard points of braver stars pierced the veil of night and orange citylight. Outside the city limits, out in the near-desert, the waning moon would shine on yucca and sandstone. It was a night for sharp teeth and quick death. The air itself was knotted tight with expectation.

We canvassed the easier places on Avery’s list first: the missions, Prosper Alley, the shooting gallery on Trask Street, the fountain in Plaskeny Square. Nada. Not a whisper of our target.

Plenty of the people we saw that night had no idea we were there. I stayed close to Saul, and Were camouflage took care of hiding us both. Weres are traditionally hunters’ allies, and plenty of times a hunter has been grateful for the furkind’s ability to conceal. I was odd among hunters in that I actually slept with my backup, but by no means unique. Most Weres don’t like bedplay with humans; we’re too fragile.

But with the scar on my wrist, I was no longer so fragile. It made things interesting.

Just the way Saul’s initial distrust and distaste for me and my helltainted self had made things interesting. Sometimes I wondered why he had come back.

You can find bums in any city. Looking for a
particular
homeless man in Santa Luz is needle-in-a-haystack frustrating. You just roll around a lot and hope to get stuck in the right place.

We were casing the second large mecca of the dispossessed in Santa Luz, Broadway. I walked beside Saul carefully, occasionally glancing down at the cracked sidewalk, threading between groups of street kids gathering in doorways and sharing cigarettes of both legal and nonlegal origin. Quite a few had bottles in brown paper bags, and a good number of them were younger than Baby Jewel. Dreadlocks, dyed hair, piercings, layers of clothing as they struggled to stay warm in the desert night, gangs and streetfamilies drawing together for comfort and protection—it was enough, really, to make a cynic out of anyone.

I caught sight of a thin, nervous-looking man with a scruff of brown hair, sharing hits off a bottle with a taller scarecrow of a black man in army fatigues. The brown-haired scruff wore a dun coat and a red backpack, black boots, and a shocking-blue T-shirt.

Saul marked him a full fifteen seconds after I did. “That him?”

“Coat, backpack, boots, and a serious case of nerves. Looks like it.” I started forward, but Saul’s hand closed around my arm. “What?”

He tilted his head. “Someone else is looking.”

I looked. There, tucked into a slice of shadow like a professional, a skinny man in a long dirty duster finished un-smoking a cigarette. The red eye glowed as he dropped it, and he was too clean-shaven to be a homeless man. And it’s not just strange to see a homeless man drop a smoke halfway to the filter, especially when he doesn’t take a drag before he does it.

It rings every wrong bell in a hunter’s head to see something like that.

“Got enough metal on him for me to smell, and he’s hunting,” Saul murmured in my ear. I barely nodded, letting him know I’d heard him.

Mercenary? Or something else?

I thought this over, examining our new player. Was he looking for Robbie or just for trouble? He didn’t seem to have the nervous witness in his sights, but he was certainly up to no good. And if Saul could smell gunplay and violence on him, he was probably someone I should have a nice little chat with.

You can call me paranoid, but I rarely believe in pure coincidence. Usually coincidence gets a little help in a situation like this.

“Get our witness. Question him if you feel like it.” I slid a slim, black-finished blade out of its sheath and reversed it along my arm. “I’ll see what’s up with our little friend over there.”

“You got it. Where should I take the jitterboy?”

I did a rapid mental calculation of location and distance. “Take him to Woo Song’s and buy him dinner, but don’t let him drink any more. I’ll meet you as soon as I can. Get
every
scrap of information you can from him. And play nice.”

“I will.” He looked, again, like he wanted to say
be careful.
But he didn’t. He merely bent down, kissed my temple, and slid away, leaving me without a Were’s camouflage.

I set off across the street at an angle calculated to bring me into our mysterious visitor’s blind spot.

Unfortunately, I realized as I was halfway across Broadway, our friend wasn’t alone. His backup was on the roof, and as bullets chewed into the pavement behind me and the screaming started, I realized that this wasn’t normal at all. Nothing about this was usual. And that usually added up to one very
fucked
Jill Kismet.

I rolled, taking cover behind a parked car. Glass shattered; whoever it was had a fucking assault rifle and was spraying the car. The knife vanished, and I spared a brief prayer for the civilians on the street.
Let’s have no casualties, Jill.

That is, except for the ones
you
want to inflict.