Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives

By the time I reached the Dutch again, faint pearly light was staining the eastern horizon. Dawn would come reluctantly, peering through a thick veil of gray cloud. Urgency beat behind my breastbone, but I had no car and no way to get one. No time to stop to call for Were backup — and Weres don’t go up against hellbreed, anyway. They aren’t built for it.

No time even to meet up with Slade’s police liaison. What could they do, the cops? Other than get killed going in where I was about to.

Near dawn, and the line at the door hadn’t gone down. It would have been depressing, if I hadn’t been moving too fast for it to matter.

I streaked across the street like a missile, using every erg of inhuman speed I possessed. Took the first bouncer with a short upward strike, bone breaking and the nasal promontory driven into the brain. Even though most Traders go for bizarre body mods married to a scrim of hellish beauty, the underlying anatomy is basically the same as the rest of us.

Underneath, we can’t get away from what we are.

I had the second one down and shot twice before the screaming started and the Trader who had minced out to open Narcisa’s limo door burst through the doorway. He looked surprised, didn’t even have time to snarl before the whip cracked across his face and I filled him with silverjacket lead. He dropped like a poleaxed steer; I stretched out in a leap across his body and darted through the open doors.

Each hellbreed hole is slightly different. The breed-only ones are mostly underground, the maggots hiding from the sun. The mixed Trader-and-breed ones are usually run by a mover and shaker in the local breed community, and decorated according to that breed’s particular obsessions. I don’t know if “obsessions” is the right word. There’s a ‘breed in my city who has her place filled with stuffed cats of every size and description — actual taxidermist-stuffed corpses of felines.

This particular hole was painted, velvet-swathed, and curlicued like a baroque French bordello. Crimson and glaring yellow, the dance floor white and black squares like a chessboard. The bar was a huge twisted thing of metal and old dark-stained oak, bottles ranked glowing behind it against a mirrored wall.

And it was crawling with Traders. Not too many full ‘breed. The beautiful damned were startled, gem-bright eyes opening wide and dark velvet mouths opening. Moving fast, boots thudding the floor, I shot a Trader between the eyes as he snarled at me, and cut a path straight for the iron door set near the back.

There’s always a door, and it’s always made of that dark, dark iron. There’s always a red velvet rope in front of it, like it’s some sort of VIP lounge, but there’s never a line. Two guards, dumb slabs of muscle with submachine guns. I was on them before the one on the right could even raise his, killed him first, took the one on the left with a leaping dropkick, knocking the barrel aside so he sprayed the oncoming Traders with hot lead. That worked so nicely I put him down hard and grabbed the submachine gun, recoil jolting all the way up my arms as I fired controlled, two-shot bursts into the crowd of Traders. Kicked the door, the scar chuckling on my wrist as barbwire heat poured up my arm, swept down my chest. The iron made a hollow boom and sagged, I kicked it again and I slid in crabwise, still shooting until the gun ran out of ammo. I chucked it at one of the Traders, it clocked him right on the forehead with a sound that would have been funny if it had been in another situation.

Wow, these things do a lot of damage. Won’t help with the breed, though. Speed it up, Jill.

The long hall stretched in front of me. Doors on either side, each as anonymous as the next. But thanks to Narcisa, I knew which one I was aiming for.

The one at the end.

The one standing ajar, slowly opening as I pelted down the hall, whip jangling and right hand flashing down to my belt, grabbing what I wanted with a swift jerk and snapping it away.

Everything now depended on speed.

I hit the slowly-opening door going full throttle, it snapped away from the hinges and I rode it like a surfboard, my boots gripping its surface. The shock of landing was broken by something kind-of-soft; I still used it to push off and landed on the table. It was a long dinner-affair with wrought-iron candelabra at even intervals, I kicked one off as I pounded down the table. Hellbreed scattered — the movers and shakers of the local community, gathered here to carve up a helpless city like a big fat roast.

Narcisa had told me enough to guess what they were aiming at. With the city’s hunter out of commission, they would have free rein until another hunter could be found. We are so few.