hard palm. I found words, for the first time since I had left Leonidas’s nightclub.
“I will ask you questions.” My voice was soft, my native tongue wearing through the syllables. “If you answer, I will not hurt you more.”
It was only half a lie.
I did not drink from the filth. I was still gorged from last night’s hunting. As fitting as it would have been to drain him, no cursed drop of his fluid would pass my lips.
His scarecrow body hung against the wall, twitching as the nerves realized life had fled. The
I should have left it there. Their kind is anathema.
But I am a Preserver, and the waste of anything irks me. Especially any part of the twilight world where I fed and sheltered my charges.
There was a long table full of silver-plated instruments, gleaming in the low sullen light. The ones closest to the thing on the wall were crusted with blood and other fluids. I allowed myself a single nose-wrinkle. The stews I had found Virginia in had smelled worse.
A glimmer of eye showed between puffed, marred lids. It was madness to consider letting the thing free. There was probably nothing human left inside that hairy shell.
As much or as little was left human inside my own hard pale shell, perhaps.
The silver-coated metal of the manacles crumpled like wet clay in my fist. Raw welts rubbed the hair from the skin everywhere they touched. They are dangerously allergic to the moon’s metal, a goddess’s curse. Or so I have always heard.
I twisted, and one collection of bright amber claws dangled free. One hand. I bent and soon the legs were free as well, hanging bare inches from the floor. I glanced up—yes, the hook in the ceiling, there, they had hoisted it to deprive it of leverage. It hung like a piece of Amelie’s washing—she had not yet lost the habit of cleaning her clothes after every night’s rising, though her body did not sweat or secrete.
Now that body lay in perishing earth. A sob caught at my throat. I denied it.
My voice sounded strange. “I hope you can understand me. I am not your enemy. I hunt those who did this to you. Go to ground and sleep until you become human again, if you can.”
It made no reply, merely hung there and watched me. Or perhaps it was dying, and the gleam of eyes was a fever-glitter. The shoulder looked agonizingly strained, sinews creaking.
“Mad,” I muttered. “I am mad.”
But I freed the last manacle anyway, the silver-plated trash bending and buckling. By the time its heavy body thudded to the ground to lie in its own filth, I was already gone. Straight up the brownstone’s wall and over the rooftop.
Behind me, a long inhuman howl ribboned away. So it was alive, after all.
Uptown. I climbed carefully, fingers driving into the spaces between bricks where putty crumbled. The street below was deserted, and in any case, who would expect to see a woman in a dress going directly up a brick wall? Human beings do not see what they do not
Each floor held a comfortable ledge right under the windows, as if the building were a lunatic belted tightly against himself. Or as if it were a worm, each segment caked with exhaust grime, rising above the ground before it dove.
Zhen held that the ancient world smelled better. I disagreed. Even with the reek of smog, there is no contest between my city and, say, Rome or Paris in their ancient, fouler days. Mortals have at least grown cleaner.
In some ways.
The fourth floor. My boot-toe gripped the ledge, I pulled myself up. Eased along it, weight balanced, velvet scraping brick. There was a smear of dried blood on the back of my left hand, other crackling bits on my face and neck. I would not wash until vengeance was complete.
It wasn’t hard to find the window. It was half open, and the reek of adrenaline and bloodshed billowed out like red dye in water.
After I had cut off three of his fingers and he still swore, I believed him.
At the very edge of the window, I held my skirts back. Leaned forward and peered in.
The room was dark. A table stacked with odd shapes, a chair, a television blindly spewing colored light. On the bed, a stabbing motion, buttocks rising and plunging down.
The Burner had company.
A slightly acrid scent—the reek of a slightly dominant male. Cheap perfume mixing with aftershave and sweat, the musk of sex. The window did not creak as I eased it wider, wider. My shadow moved on the floor, I hopped down light as a leaf while the rhythm of creaking bedsprings became frantic. Softly I stepped across the thin carpet, avoiding a pile of clothing. Smoke-scent rose in simmering waves.
He had not even washed the stink of murder away. Loathing choked me. I glided to the bedside and looked down just as the man stiffened, his head thrown back. The woman’s eyes were closed, her long pale hair spread on the pillow and her painted face garish even in the dark.
My claws sank into flesh and I ripped him up and away, viselike fingers clamped at the base of his neck. Just like a mother cat chastising a kitten—or a Preserver teaching a new charge to control the Thirst.
He flew across the room, hit the television on its low dresser. Glass shattered, wood splintered, and the woman inhaled to scream.
“Shhh.” I laid my finger against my lips. She swallowed her cry, staring. My eyes would be glowing yellow by now. “Gather your clothes, child, and flee.”
Her raddled face crumpled, but she did not make a sound. I turned my back on her and found the man crawling for the table and his weapons—I saw hilts and ugly penile gun-shapes. I caught him halfway there with a kick that threw him into a flimsy chair he’d set in the corner, the sweet sound of ribs snapping echoing off every wall. The tank settled in the chair toppled, liquid splashing, and the cap on its top bounced away. I smelled petrol and that same odd cloying additive.
The Burner lay moaning. Short dark hair, a hefty build. He was probably light on his feet, though, he would have to be. If they hunted anything other than a Preserver’s helpless charges, they needed speed and ruthlessness.
Not that it would help him.
I was on him in a moment. Naked flesh, veined and crawling with the incipient death every mortal was heir to. One arm cracked with a greenstick snap. He howled. The tank glugged out a small lake of cold liquid. Soaking the carpet, splashing. I grabbed his short hair and ground his face down. That cut off the howling, and I do not deny a savage satisfaction. His hands flapped, long white fish.
My arm flexed, I pushed harder. His skull creaked, and I had to restrain myself. I didn’t want to, but breaking his head open was too quick and easy.
The door opened as the woman fled. She had not stopped to clothe herself, and she was screaming as well. A slice of golden electronic light from the hall narrowed. I flexed again, dragging the man’s face along the sodden carpet. Then I pulled his head up and rose, claws digging. He screamed, scrambling to get away, and I flung him across the room again. He hit the wall over the bed with a sickening crack, dislodging a forgettable, mass-produced painting. Not like Amelie’s exquisite color-drenched canvases.
Fury poured through me. I leapt on the bed almost before he landed, broke his other arm. He could not get in enough air to scream, was making little whispering hopeless sounds.
Had Amelie made those sounds? Had she pleaded for her life?
The smell—petrol and that additive, and the bright copper of blood—maddened me. I thrust my hand into his vitals, another layer of stench exploding out, claws shredding. I was aiming to pierce his diaphragm, tear through lungs and hold his beating heart in my palm before I crushed it.
The door to the hall burst open, and the little pocking sounds around me were bullets plowing into the bed. I
