Four Roads Cross (6 page)

Cat swore. The Suit in the kitchen was busy, binding Apron and Sideburns amid the mess of fallen pots and pans.

If Cat donned her Suit, she could be outside in a second, bursting through the plate glass window to the street. Instead she ran out the front door, turned the corner so tight her shoes slipped on concrete and she almost fell, caught herself on the ground with one hand—

Glass shattered above as Maura Varg dove out the bedroom window, shard-misted, forearms crossed to shield her face, farther than a running jump should have taken her, and arced headfirst toward the pavement.

Cat sprinted across the street toward her, arms pistoning. If she could catch Varg before she came upright—

A cry from her left, and too late she heard the triple-beat of a horse at gallop.
Should have closed the street—
she looked left and saw wide black equine eyes and rearing hooves and a rider's moon-shaped face beneath an absurd tricornered hat as the hooves came down. She dodged through molasses, the horse eighteen hands at least and plunging, and she knew what those hooves could do to human flesh—

She fell into the silver void, into the ice-melt lake that waited at her brain stem's root, and leapt clear of the hooves, which could not hurt her anymore, because she wasn't human anymore exactly.

Nor was she, exactly, Cat.

But she didn't want to hurt the horse.

Hooves fell, slow as a ballerina's lofted leg descending. Somewhere a butterfly's wing beat. On North Shore, a wave rolled onto the beach and did not roll back.

She stood in the road, a statue of fluid silver. Behind her, other Blacksuits secured the apartment safe house, which she saw in flashes: dreamglass piled on the kitchen counter, broken bones and windows, captives splayed on the floor. Safe. In front of her, Maura Varg fled into an alley. Cat followed her. She closed with Varg, not fast enough—the woman's glyphwork must be pushing her to the edge of sanity, to outrun a Suit. Alley shadows fell slick on Cat's skin, and far below the world she heard the sunken moon's song.

A carriage pulled up at the far end of the alley, door open. She saw it, and through silver the other Suits saw it, too, and Justice activated plainclothes officers nearby for pursuit. Varg would make the carriage before Cat could catch her. Normal horses couldn't outrun a Blacksuit, but not all horses were normal.

A black, burning blur fell on Varg from the rooftops. She struck pavement and then the alley wall, skidded, found her feet in a tussle with a smoking human figure. Not a Blacksuit—and really burning, skin licked by flame, charcoal flakes falling as he moved. Fangs flashed bone white within the fire.

Raz.

Varg jumped on him. He hit her three times; the fourth time she caught his wrist. Glyphs shone noon bright on her arms. She spun him around and caught his neck in the crook of her arm. Her blade steadied against his throat.

Cat stopped.

They stood opposed in the alley.

“That's right,” Varg said. “Don't move.”

Varg backed toward the carriage. Cat took two steps forward.

Raz's fires died, leaving scales of char like a snake's dried skin about to shed.

“I'll kill him.”

Cat had seen Raz survive a broken neck. But she didn't know his limits, and did not want to test them now.

Seize her, the silver sang. Hold her. Bring her to Justice.

She forced the Suit aside, and fell from heaven's gates. Silver seeped away and she was only Cat again.

The knife pressed into his skin.

She held out her hand—pink, weak, shaking with aftershocks of ecstasy. Varg could break her now, if she wanted. “Let him go. You can't run.”

“I can run forever,” Maura Varg said.

Her glyphs guttered like 3:00
A.M.
coals.

Raz smiled, though maybe he was just gritting his teeth.

Then he hit Varg hard in the face with the back of his head.

Varg's nose shattered. Her knife tore into his neck. He fell, limp. Varg staggered, and in that second Cat leapt on her, threw her into the wall, hit her in the face, the jaw, doubled her over her knee. Varg crumpled and lay still, though breathing.

Cat ran to Raz.

Blood poured down his collar, a red scarf over his bleach-white shirt. His hand rose, trembling, to his neck, but could not reach.

She knelt beside him, took his wrist, felt the direction he wanted it to go, and pressed his hand against his wound. His teeth were white and sharp.

She shed her jacket, unbuttoned her shirt cuff, and pushed it up. Scars marked on her forearm, paired pinpricks, long gashes, faded, yes, but there was only so much a year could heal. If she was younger, they might have healed completely.

She raised her wrist to his mouth. His nostrils flared. There was a need in her—gods, such a need—hunger for the fullness she'd abandoned a year ago, but she found herself here anyway, in the alley, so weak.

His fangs bared.

She shivered in anticipation.

He pressed his lips together, shook his head.

She slumped beside him. “You really.” She was breathing hard, and not from the run. “You really should let me know what can kill you.”

“I'm.” His first try was wet and windy at once. He spit blood onto the pavement. “I'm not exactly sure. Extended sunlight, probably. Decapitation. It's not like there's a manual. And only dumb kids go around trying to off themselves.”

“Yeah?”

“It's an existentialist thing.”

“Never did trust philosophy.” A pause, in which she failed again to find her breath. “You didn't know you'd survive that?”

“I've had my throat slit before. I don't experiment, but other people always seem happy to oblige.”

“Pirate.”

“Cop.”

She shrugged. “Thanks.”

“Hells. Now we have her, you have an excuse to take her ship. That's the real prize. Rescue the people she's smuggling, save the day. And I needed to work on my tan.”

She punched him in the arm. He winced.

Inside her, the pit still yawned, and beneath that pit, another, deeper.

 

7

The goddess addressed Cat in the shower, in her mother's voice.

Catherine, why do you turn from me?

Oh, I don't know if I turn from you as such, she replied as she shampooed. We have a close working relationship.

You live inside my body, yet we don't talk like I do with my children.

I barely had my life figured out working with Justice. Then you came along.

You visited back alley bloodsucker dens for the thrill of being drunk. Does that constitute having your life figured out?

I didn't say I had it figured well. Just figured. She soaped down, rinsed off, turned into the shower spray. I was raised to think you were dead, and a traitor. Your children were my childhood ghosts.

That isn't my fault.

She shut off the water, reached blind for her towel, and rubbed herself dry.

I can help you. We can be closer than the structure of Justice allows. You are a priestess. You have made a vow. You could perform miracles.

Miracles aren't my job.

The voice did not answer. Somewhere beneath her feet, the moon smiled.

She had a fresh change of clothes in her locker, and as she put it on she convinced herself she felt clean.

*   *   *

She was halfway through the paperwork on the morning's raid when a duty officer—Cramden, she thought, beneath the Suit—came to tell her Tara Abernathy was looking for her. “Send her back,” Cat said, and watched him go, smooth and assured, rippling silver.

She hadn't made progress on the paperwork when the door opened again. She looked up from the form, exasperated. “How do you spell ‘ceiling'?”

Tara wrote the glyphs in air with her fingertip and shut the door behind her. “Long day?”

“Two long days,” she said, “and it's only one thirty. It'll be four long days before I'm done.”

“I need you at a meeting tonight.”

“Can't. I have an operation. And this.” She fanned the forms.

“Paperwork,” Tara said, skeptical. She paced the confines of Cat's office, and “confines” was the right word: a cubbyhole of the Temple of Justice intended for solitary monastics meditating on their Lady. A bas-relief of a robed woman occupied one wall, its eyes notched out with a clean chisel strike. What light there was shafted through high slit windows; there had been more direct sun before they built the bank next door. “Why do you need after-action reports? Justice is in your head.”

“Paperwork makes us more than just another gang. In the year since Seril came back, it's grown more important than ever. She has opinions—Justice didn't.”

“Justice claimed she didn't. Study her arrest record and you'll see patterns emerge. Not nice patterns, either.”

“At least she was fair.”

“She arrested me for treason. You'll excuse me if I don't share your estimation of her impartiality.”

“Slow down, college girl. You broke a lot of laws, even if you stopped bad people from doing worse.”

“You, and your Blacksuits, almost got us all killed. Or enslaved.”

“You hypnotized me and sent me into a vampire's sickroom, knowing I'd shove my arm in his mouth. I'm only here at all because he has more self-control than either of us.”

“You—” Tara's voice went sharp and hot, and she wheeled on Cat with one hand raised. But she stopped herself, and closed her mouth, and sat at last in the chair across from Cat's desk. “You were telling me about the paperwork.”

Cat assembled the sheets into a pile. “Seril's bound by the same rules as Justice—but she's conscious, and her perspective warps things. We've stepped up the plainclothes officer program as a result. Used to be intelligence gathering only, moles and vice, but now it's expanded to a double role, intelligence and oversight. The guys with families don't like it—if they show their faces, they're exposed to revenge and old-fashioned blackmail. Those of us who don't have as much to lose, step up.” She dropped the papers into a wire tray. “So, much as I miss our pleasant chats, I'll pass on the meeting.”

“The gargoyles are exposed,” Tara said.

“I heard. You talked to Gabby Jones down at the guild?”

“She won't pull the story. She's right not to. It is the truth, even if it's the wrong truth.” Tara scraped one fingernail down her chair's leather armrest. “We need to regulate the damage, which means keeping Seril and Aev's people under wraps. I got most of them to promise to cut out the vigilantism, but Shale won't, and Aev won't let me stop him. So Alt Coulumb has to be the safest city in the world, starting tonight.”

“I'm beginning to get the impression this isn't just about me coming to your meeting,” Cat said.

“You have a lot of Blacksuits booked for an operation tonight. Cancel the op. Put them on the street instead.”

“No.”

“This is a big deal, Cat. We need the city safe tonight.”

“This morning Raz helped us catch an indenture-trader in a drug bust. That gives us grounds to seize and search her ship, to save those people. If we don't take them tonight, her crew has standing orders to sail out of reach. You want that on your conscience?”

Cat wasn't good at reading people, but even she could see the
yes
in the set of Tara's shoulders, in the angle of her head and the tension at the corners of her mouth. And even she could see the woman recoil from that yes. “No,” she said.

“I'm sorry.”

“It's the right thing to do,” Tara told Cat, and herself.

Neither of them spoke for a while.

“Tara,” she said at last, “is it normal to hear gods in your head?”

“I'm not a person of faith,” Tara replied. “Sort of the opposite.”

“You know how these things work, though.”

“From the outside. But no, it's not usual.”

“Seril talks to me, sometimes.”

“The gods.” Tara steepled her fingers, and in that gesture she recalled Ms. Kevarian, Tara's teacher, mentor—and Denovo, too, the monster whose student Tara had been. “They aren't part of time and space like we are. They're second-order effects of humanity. We feel them. When we pray, or take the field against them, we … bind them into time. But they don't do small talk. In general, only saints can hear their voices.”

“So I'm talking to myself.”

“I doubt it. We've changed. Take you, for example: you were a bit rudderless a year ago.”

“Hey,” she said, but didn't mean it.

“And now you're tied to a being who's nothing but direction. Maybe that makes the difference. And Seril's a smaller god, not spread between as many worshippers. So each one means more to her. Or maybe she thinks you're a saint.” Tara shrugged. “I kill gods and guard them, and raise them from the dead when they die. I don't pray.”

“But you're hearing voices, too,” Cat said.

Tara drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. The wall clock ticked. She nodded, once.

“At least I'm not going mad alone.”

Tara stood. “Meeting's at seven, at the Temple of Kos. Can you come? Please?”

“We sail at eight.”

“It won't take long.”

“Why do you want me? This whole thing's above my pay grade.”

“We saved the city,” Tara said. “We're responsible for it now.”

“I wish someone had told me before I decided to save it.”

Tara laughed without sound. Then she shook Cat's hand and left.

 

8

The Paupers' Quarter market closed at one, and afterward, as ever in time of crisis, Matt Adorne and the other market elders met for lunch at Cadfael's Bar and Grill.

“It's a travesty,” whitebeard Corbin Rafferty raged, punctuating his tirade with a long swig of dark beer. “We sacrifice to God and we pay dues to Justice. And in return they let godsdamn Stone Men,” his voice shaking, “Stone Men haunt our streets. Bloodthirsty.” He stuffed his mouth with burger, bit down hard, and gnashed. “We have to do something.”