Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives

In the end it took one of his elbows, too. By then the Traders were smears of bubbling black, corruption eating at their tissues, and the primrose-eyed ‘breed screamed until I put him out of his misery. Silence descended through the foul reek.

I swallowed hard, set my jaw, and took just enough time to clean the contamination of hellbreed away with whispering blue banefire, shaken off my fingers like oil, before I got going. I didn’t even stop to wash the blood off my face.

When another hunter calls, you go. It’s that simple. We who hold back the tide of Hell don’t ask for help lightly. I had irons in the fire back home, but Slade had called. A short message— Trouble brewing. Something big. Need backup. And I was on a plane and out of my town before the sun rose, ending up in his territory over a thousand miles away. Where the skies were always gray and there was a coffee shop on every single corner. The whole city smelled like concrete and old, moldy java.

I didn’t have a chance to ask why he’d called me, since he’d disappeared before I could get here.

We’d done hunter residencies together in New Orleans with Katja Lefevre, and that had been one sliptilting screamfest after another. I still had scars twitching from those six months. But you don’t ask questions. A hunter won’t call another away from her territory without a damn good reason.

His house on its quiet tree-lined street was empty, the front door smashed to flinders and Slade himself gone. The local Weres, Slade’s backup, knew nothing. The hellbreed weren’t opening their mouths much. All I had was a name — Narcisa. And another one: the Dutch.

I didn’t know what Narcisa meant. But the Dutch was a hellbreed club downtown, near the open air market where they threw fish around during the day.

I was glad to miss that. I mean, come on. Flinging fish?

The skyline here was alien territory. Santa Luz is desert, but Slade’s city lives under a perpetual gray drizzle. You wouldn’t think it would make much difference to a nocturnal creature. Dark is dark, and it gets cold in the desert too.

I crouched on the rooftop, dripping hair, dripping from my nose and fingertips, my leather trench shedding water thanks to the waterproofing. Weather means very little to a full-fledged hunter, but the chill in this place reached right into my bones.

It wasn’t physical.

Across the street, the neon sign for the Dutch — a flying ship, of all things, with both oars and sail, lovingly rendered in glowing tubes — cast sickly green and red glow down into the wet street. Music pulsed in bass-thumping ribbons inside, the double doors flung wide in invitation. There was a line going down the block, but nobody seemed to have umbrellas. Just standing there in the wet.

No Traders in the line — they walked right in past the Trader bouncers. No visible hellbreed, but they would be inside.

They usually are. Ready and waiting, like spiders in a web.

Back in Santa Luz it was an hour ahead but a world away. Dark falls quickly out in the desert, like a guillotine blade. I would have hit the streets as dusk did, and probably already been in one or two short sharp fights. Since Mikhail was dead, plenty of them thought I’d be easy to get past or roll over.

Don’t think about that, Jill. Focus.

I eased my weight back and forth, watching. A hunter learns early to draw a cloak of silence over the waiting, an uncanny stillness. Within that circle of quiet, though, you have to move a little bit. Shifting and adjusting to keep the muscles primed for action.

And as usual while I was waiting, the memories came back. My teacher’s final gurgle as the scarlet gush of his life left him, his body stiffening then slumping in my arms, becoming deadweight. The bitch who killed him was gone, good luck finding her now. And here I was a thousand miles from my city on a wild goose chase, and God only knew what was going on at home —

Stop. Intuition tingled. Look, Jill. Something’s there.

Indeed, something was. A long glossy-black limousine pulled up to the curb, and the bouncers tensed. A Trader — blond, male, long legs, in a sharp dark suit — strolled out of the club’s wide-flung mahogany doors.

The scar puckered, a hurtful throb. The mark of a hellbreed’s lips against the tender inner flesh of my right wrist tasted the predatory glee on the air.

I was harder to kill now. Much harder.

Was it worth the price I’d paid? Especially since I hadn’t been fast enough or strong enough when it counted.

Stop it. Look at what’s happening.

Premonition tingled along every inch of me. A hunter becomes a full-blown psychic before long. Sorcery will do that for you.

And when you spend your life dealing with the nightside it’s more of a survival mechanism than a perk.