Angel Town (10 page)

T
he Sanctuary gave up trying to shake me and hugged me again, and she was actually
crying
. Her soft, unlined face blotched up, and the defenses in her walls made another low, unhappy sound. She looked for all the world like a grade-school girl crying in the bathroom.

Galina was old, though. Old enough to remember the hunters before me.

Old enough to know things I didn’t.

“—
worried
about you!” she finished up into my leather-clad shoulder. The rest of her smelled like fabric softener, smoky sorcery, apples, and an acrid tang of worry and tension. “What the hell happened? It’s been
months
! One second we had Saul back, everything was wrapped up, and then—”

“Give her a second, Galina.” Theron folded his arms, leaning against a glass case. Mummified alligators, a scatter of tarot-card packets, and wristlets with brass bells crouched inside the case along with statuettes and chunks of semiprecious stones. “Our Kismet’s come back from the dead, it looks like. Saved my ass over at the Monde.”

“And you should
not
have been there, Were,” Devi piped up, with a meaningful eyeroll. “First things first, though. What the fuck was that asshole doing here? And Galina, while you’re explaining that to me, I need one of your vaults. Altar and circle.” The other hunter drew in a deep breath. “Jill’s going
between
.”

I blinked again. That was her plan?

Well, great. That’s just peachy. Someone stop the world, please, I want to get off.

I slid each gun back into its dark home, quietly, my breath coming hard and high and my arms weak as noodles.
Jesus. Jesus Christ. Perry.

You could’ve heard a pin drop. Galina held me at arm’s length, peering up at me. Dark hair fell in my face, the silver spider weighing down a curl, and I just stood there and suffered it.

There really wasn’t any other choice. And I needed a few seconds to get myself together, so to speak. Something was rising under the hole torn in my memory, and I didn’t like the look of it.

Saul took two steps forward. He was still gaunt, but the sheer amount of food he’d managed to pour down his throat was showing. The dark circles under his burning eyes had gone down a little, too.

Or maybe I was just hoping they had.

Had he really been ready to throw himself at Perry? The thought of
that
particular dance number, even within Galina’s hallowed walls, was enough to turn everything inside me cold and loose.

“
Between?
” He sounded mildly enquiring, but a rumble poured under the surface of the word. “That’s it? That’s your wonderful idea?”

“Oh, Lord.” Theron sighed. “This is not going to end well.” He leaned against the case like we hadn’t just seen a ’breed wink out of existence. Of course, Galina
had
told Perry to leave. But still…I had never seen a ’breed do that before.

I’d never
heard
of a ’breed doing that before, either.

Come on, Jill. With the holes in your head, can you be sure?

Still, he’d done things before that made him different from the usual scion of Hell. The only thing I was getting any surer of was that Perry was a separate fish indeed. I had a cold, sinking suspicion deep down in my gut, and I wasn’t liking it. As much as Mikhail taught me not to assume, this was looking very very bad.

Anya shrugged and slid past Galina, her leather duster creaking slightly. She was pale. “It’s the only thing I can think of, Were. The bigger question is, though—”

“You’d better think again.”

God, give me patience.
But there was no answer. I was on my own, as usual.

I tipped my head back. “Stop it.” I sounded very small. “I’m doing what she says.”

“I’ve got a better way to bring a memory back. But nobody asked me.” Anger glittered and smoked under Saul’s tone, and that growl spread out, rattling the windows facing the street. The Chevy sat in a glare of afternoon sun, its pale patches leprous. The telephone poles up and down Jimenez wavered slightly in the heat. The air-conditioning kicked on, soughing cold air through vents, and the walls of the shop resounded again, but gently, all its power held in check. “And that hellspawn son of a bitch is here,
inside
Sanctuary, and gets close enough to touch her, and none of you
do
anything? What the fuck is going on?”

“Ease up, Saul.” Theron, oddly conciliatory. Of course, he was a Were.

But Saul didn’t sound like a Were. Saul sounded downright furious.

“I
lost my mate
.” Saul was suddenly next to me, his fingers curling around my shoulder. “And the only thing you can think of is throwing her
between
? She
doesn’t remember
.”

“You…” Galina’s hands dropped to her sides. She cocked her head, her marcelled waves falling just-so, and glanced from my face up over my shoulder, then at Theron. “What
happened
, Jill?”

I get the feeling I should be asking
you
that.
“I
don’t know
. Not much, anyway.” I kept my hands away from the guns with an effort that threatened to make me sweat even under the AC. The shudder that went through me made my own leather coat creak, weapons shifting. “Devi says I can remember how I wrapped up that case. I’m down with that. So let’s just get it over with.” I made a lunging mental effort, trying to prioritize. “No. Wait. Wait just a second. Where’s Gilberto, and goddammit, what was Perry doing here?”

“Gil’s upstairs.” Galina’s soft mouth turned down at the corners. “With Hutch. I wanted them both safe and out of the way.”

Well, hooray for that. One thing to be happy about, I guess.

“And Perry?” Anya had turned away, studying the fall of sunlight through the windows. Tension sang in the set of her slim shoulders. “I am very, very interested in why
he’s
here, Sanctuary.”

The Sanc actually shot her a quelling glance. It would’ve been magnificently effective, maybe, if Devi had been looking. “He was waiting.” Galina’s gaze darted to me, and for a moment, I could have sworn she looked almost frightened. “For Jill.”

I plunged my hands into the stream of cold water. The upstairs bathroom was familiar, sun falling in through the skylight and caressing every surface. She’d chosen a nice soothing blue up here, with little Art Deco accents. Maybe she realized she looked like a silent film star, so she might as well have a stage set.

They were fighting down in the kitchen. Saul’s voice, raised, rattling the walls. Galina’s, unhappy but patient. Anya Devi throwing in a spiked comment every now and again, just often enough to keep it at a boil. She wasn’t going to win any smoothing-the-waters awards.

It wasn’t like her. Devi knew Weres better than anyone—they helped her hunt the scurf infestation in Sierra Cancion, keeping it as contained as possible. Weres are scurf’s natural enemies, and Anya was close to a Were herself, what with the munchies and her disciplined ferocity.

Still, the situation here was enough to tax anyone’s temper. And hunters aren’t known for interpersonal patience.

The bathroom door quivered, and when I glanced up, a scrawny-tall cholo stood there eyeing me. Lank dark hair fell in his acne-pitted face, without a hairnet for once, and his dark eyes were even more flat and lifeless than they had been. He’d put on some more muscle and shot up a couple inches, and the way he braced himself, leaning lightly against the doorjamb, told me someone had been training him.

Anya. You asked her to. Or she just did what another hunter would have done, stepped in to finish what you started.

There was a gleam on his chest, a razor-linked chain holding a barbaric, bloody gem. It rested uneasily against his faded flannel button-down. If he’d been shirtless, his narrow face with its high bladed nose might’ve been a little less pizza and a little more Aztec.

My apprentice’s hands twitched a little. Jeans and engineer boots, his fingernails were clean, and I was assessing him from top to toe before he even opened his mouth.

Weighing. Measuring. As if I was still his mentor. Small wonder—he’d chosen me, not Devi, and I winced when I thought of what this must be doing to him.

“Eh,
profesora
.” He grinned. A shark’s wide humorless smile, curving his thin lips, and in that moment you could see a flash of who he might have been. “Had enough vacation, gonna go back to work?”

I almost snorted.
Was I just worrying about this kid?
But there was a hair-fine tremor under his façade. Gilberto Rosario Perez-Ayala had a shark’s smile, true. Even in the barrio’s seethe that grin would make seasoned gangbang cholos step back and reconsider.

But on the inside, he was a hunter’s apprentice. With the dangerous but exactly right mix of need, aggression, loyalty, a goddamn bundle of twitchy neuroses, and a need to prove himself big enough to get him into serious trouble if he wasn’t trained hard—and trained right.

Which was my job, and I’d failed by dying on him.

“Gilberto.” I dipped my chin at the bloody, sullen gem on his chest. “That needs to be drained. And soon.”

I didn’t ask how the Eye of Sekhmet had ended up on
him
. The last time I’d seen my teacher’s greatest prize, its razor-edged chain had been hugging my own neck.

Because Perry had left it in my warehouse. A present.
In the nature of recovered property.

That snagged a deduction out of the soup of memory. “Belisa.” I stared at the Eye, and it responded, its humming almost breaking into the audible as etheric force tensed like a fist. “He got it from Belisa, somehow.”

Gilberto shrugged. His long spider fingers worked at the chain, but it wasn’t any good, he couldn’t get any purchase. It was kind of funny, seeing such a male reaction to jewelry.

He finally gave up and lifted the gem carefully from his chest, gingerly sliding his fingers under and working the chain around his ears and the rest of his head. “Makes me nervous.” Sunlight gilded highlights into his hair, but it was merciless to his pitted cheeks. “Devi, she say to hold it for you. She thought you weren’t comin’ back.
Estupida
. But I took it anyway. You hold what you got to,
profesora
. Learned that somewhere else.”

You hold what you got to.
He wasn’t old enough to know how true that really was. “Yeah.” The water slid over my hands. I scrubbed them against each other as if they had blood on them. Which, given my job, was a good possibility. The sink was chill white porcelain, and it felt good to just let the water carry everything away.

Jill, you’re hiding. What the hell?

He offered it, the sharp links dangling from his fist. There was a healing scrape across the back of his left hand, looked like matburn. How was Devi finding time to spar with him, if there was a war on Weres and all sorts of other shit going on?

The Eye’s gleam sharpened, and the stream of water over my hands warmed. I shut off the faucet and flicked my fingers. “Keep it. It’s safer with you.”
Because if I take that, I’m going hunting for Perry. And that is probably what he wants, so it’s a Very Bad Idea.

Gilberto shrugged, his shoulders hunching. “You went off to dance with
la Muerta
,
profesora
. Months you been gone, and things going to hell.” He acknowledged the pun with a curled lip, and the Eye hummed slightly in his grip. The chain trembled a little, its links scraping.

Like lovers’ fingernails. I knew what that felt like.

Gil watched my face. “What you gonna do? We drowning. Losing turf every day, and
la otra cazadora
ain’t got time to see the half of it. Weres getting squeezed onto Mayfair and the barrio, and I’m not thinking Mayfair gonna hold out much longer.”

I shuddered. Mickey’s was out on Mayfair, the only Were-run restaurant I knew of. Plenty of nightsiders caught a meal or a cuppa joe there, and it was relatively neutral ground.

Neutral, that is, as long as the hellbreed hadn’t declared open war on Weres and were making it dangerous during the
day
. This was all sorts of wrong, and it pointed to something big.

Trust Gil to put it in terms of a gang war, too. It actually wasn’t a half-bad metaphor.

The Eye quivered, dangling from his fingers. Every inch of skin on me prickled, as if I were standing on a flat plain right in a thunderstorm’s path, the tallest thing around.

“
Profesora
?
” The trembling in him was more pronounced. “What we do now?”

Like this wasn’t a disaster in progress I didn’t have a clue about how to start solving. It was like five shots of espresso and a bullet whizzing past, like dusk falling, a jolt that peeled back layers of confusion and woke me out of a stupor.

My apprentice was counting on me. Every soul in this city was counting on me to figure out what the ’breed were up to, and fast.

Why else had I been sent back? I’d said that.
They sent me.

Sent, brought, what the hell, didn’t matter. I tipped my head back, rolled my aching shoulders in their sockets. Leather creaked, and the gem on my wrist sent a little zing through me, a needle-sharp nerve-thrill.

Vacation’s over, Jill. Get back to work.

Everything clicked into place. My chin came down and my eyes opened. I tapped two damp fingers on a gun butt, thinking, and Gil’s face eased visibly.

“
Profesora
?
” No longer tentative, but he was waiting for direction. The Eye made a low, dissatisfied sound.

“Put that thing back on, Gil. You’re my apprentice; it’s yours. I’ve got to go downstairs and break up that fight.” I took a deep breath. “If I’m going to go
between
, it’s better sooner than later. Anya’ll hold the Eye while I do; it’ll even drain it and solve two problems at once.”