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  My fist met the hell-thing's lean malformed face, which exploded. It shredded, runnels of foulness bursting through its skin, and the sudden cloying reek would have torn my dinner loose from my stomach moorings if I'd eaten anything.

  Christ, I wish it didn't stink so bad. But stink means dead, and if this thing's dead it's one less fucking problem for me to deal with.

  No time. I gained my feet, shaking my right fist. Gobbets of preternatural flesh whipped loose, splatting dully against the brick walls. I uncoiled, leaping for the front of the alley.

  The Trader was only human, and he hadn't made his big deal yet. He was tainted by the arkeus's will, but he wasn't given superstrength or near-invulnerability yet.

  The only enhanced human being left in the alley was me. Thank God.

  I dug my fingers into his shoulder and set my feet, yanking him back. The baby howled, emptying its tiny lungs, and I caught it on its way down, my arm tightening maybe a little too much to yank it against my chest. I tried to avoid smacking it with a knife-hilt.

  I backhanded the man with my hellbreed-strong right fist. Goddamn it. What am I going to do now?

  The baby was too small, wrapped in a bulky blue blanket that smelled of cigarette smoke and grease. I held it awkwardly in one arm while I contemplated the sobbing heap of sorry manflesh crumpled against a pile of garbage.

  I've cuffed plenty of Traders one-handed, but never while holding a squirming, bellowing bundle of little human that smelled not-too-fresh. Still, it was a cleaner reek than the arkeus's rot. I tested the cuffs, yanked the man over, and checked his eyes. Yep. The flat shine of the dusted glittered in his irises. He was a thin, dark-haired man with the ghost of childhood acne still hanging on his cheeks, saliva glittering wetly on his chin.

  I found his ID in his wallet, awkwardly holding the tiny yelling thing in the crook of my arm. Jesus. Mikhail never trained me for this. "Andy Hughes. You are under arrest. You have the right to be exorcised. Anything you say will, of course, be ignored, since you've forfeited your rights to a trial of your peers by trafficking with Hell." I took a deep breath. "And you should thank your lucky stars I'm not in a mood to kill anyone else tonight. Who does the baby belong to?"

  He was still gibbering with fear, and the baby howled. I could get nothing coherent out of either of them.

  Then, to complete the deal, the pager went off against my hip, vibrating silently in its padded pocket.

  Great.

  Chapter Two

  Cities need people like us, those who go after things the cops can't catch and keep the streets from boiling over.

  We handle nonstandard exorcisms, Traders, hellbreed, rogue Weres, scurf, Sorrows, Middle Way adepts… all the fun the nightside can come up with. Normally a hunter's job is just to act as a liaison between the paranormal community and the regular police, make sure everything stays under control.

  Or, if not under control, then at least reasonably orderly. Which, as a definition, allows for anything between "no bodies in the street" to "just short of actual chaos."

  Hey, you've got to be flexible.

  Sometimes—often enough—it's our job to find people that have been taken by the things that go bump in the night. When I say "find" I mean their bodies, because humans don't live too long on the nightside unless they're hunters. More often than not our mission is vengeance, to restore the unsteady balance between the denizens of the dark and regular oblivious people.

  To make a statement and keep the things creeping in the dark just there—creeping, instead of swaggering.

  And also more often than not, we lay someone's soul to rest if killing them is just the beginning.

  We work pretty closely with the regular police, mostly because freelance hunters don't last long enough to have a career. Even the FBI has its Martindale Squad, hunters and Weres working on nightside fun and games at the national and cross-state level. It's whispered that the CIA and NSA have their own divisions of hunters too, but I don't know about that.

  For a hunter like me, the support given by the regular cops and DA's office is critical. It is, after all, law enforcement we're doing. Even if it is a little unconventional.

  Okay. A lot unconventional.

  The baby I unloaded at Sisters of Mercy downtown, the granite Jesus on the roof still glaring at the financial district. The hospital would find out who it belonged to, if at all possible. Avery came down to take possession of the prisoner, who was sweat-drenched, moaning with fear, and had pissed his already-none-too-clean pants.

  I must have been wearing my mad face.

  "Jesus Christ. Don't you ever sleep?" Avery's handsome, mournful look under its mop of dark curly hair was sleepy and uninterested until he peered through the porthole in the door. He brightened a little, his breath making a brief circle of mist spring up on the reinforced glass.

  "I try not to sleep. It disturbs the circles I'm growing under my eyes. This naughty little boy just brushed with an arkeus, didn't get much." I leaned against the wall in the institutional hallway, listening to the sound of the man's hoarse weeping on the other side of the steel observation door. Sisters of Mercy is an old Catholic hospital, and like most old Catholic hospitals it has a room even the most terrifying nun won't enter.

  A hunter's room. Or more precisely, a room for the holding of people needing an exorcism until a hunter or a regular exorcist can get to them.

  A lot of hunters have trouble with exorcisms. They're perfectly simple; the trouble comes from the psychological cost of ripping things out of people. Some hunters who won't blanch at murdering a half-dozen Traders at once quaver at the prospect of a simple rip-the-thing-out-and-dispel-it. Maybe it's the screaming or the bleeding, though God knows there's enough of that in our regular work.

  Mikhail hadn't been a quavery one, and I guess neither was I. Exorcisms are straight simple work and usually end up with the victim alive. I call that an easy job.

  "A standard half-rip, then. Not even worth getting out of bed for." Avery stuffed his hands in his pockets, rocking up on his toes again to peer in the thick-barred window. I'd kept the Trader cuffed and dumped him in the middle of a consecrated circle scored into the crumbling concrete floor. Etheric energy running through the deep carved lines sparked, responding to the taint of hellbreed on the man's aura.-

  "He was about to hand a baby over to a hellbreed. Don't be too gentle." I peeled myself upright, the silver charms tinkling in my hair. "I've got to get over to the precinct house, Montaigne just buzzed me. Maybe I'll bring in another one for you tonight."

  Avery made a face, still peering in at the Trader.

  "Jesus. A baby? And shouldn't you be going home? This is the fourth one you've brought in this week."

  Who's keeping track? Traders had been cropping up with alarming regularity, though. I snorted, my fingers checking each knife-hilt. "Home? What's that? Duty calls."

  "You gonna come out for a beer with me on Saturday?"

  "You bet." I'd rescheduled twice with him so far, each time because of a Trader. People were making bargains with hellbreed left and right these days. "If I'm not hanging out on a rooftop waiting for a fucking arkeus to show up, I'll be there."

  He came back down onto his heels, twitching his corduroy jacket a little to get it to hang straight over the bulge of his police-issue sidearm. "You should really slack off a bit, Kiss. You're beginning to look a little…"

  Yeah. Slack off. Sure. "Be careful." I turned on my heel. "See you Saturday."

  "I mean it, Kismet. You should get some rest."

  If I took a piña colada by the pool, God knows what would boil up on the streets. "When the hellbreed slow down, so will I. Happy trails, Ave."

  He mumbled a goodbye, bending to dig in the little black bag sitting obediently by his feet. He was the official police exorcist, handling most of the Traders I brought in unless there was something really unusual about them.

  He only really seemed to come alive during a difficult exorcism, the rest of the ti
me moving sleepily through the world with a slow smile that got him a great deal of female attention. Despite that, not a lot of women stayed.

  Probably because he worked the night shift tearing the bargains out of Traders or Possessors out of morbidly religious victims. Women don't like it when their man spends his nights somewhere else, even if it is with screaming Hell-tainted sickos instead of other women.

  I hit the door at the end of the hall, allowing myself a single nosewrinkle at the stinging scent of disinfectant and human pain in the air. The scar burned, my ears cringing from the slightest noise and the fluorescent lights hurting my eyes. I needed to find a better way to cover it up, and quick.

  It's not every hunter who has a hellbreed mark on her wrist, after all. A hard knotted scar, in the shape of a pair of lips puckered up and pressed against the underside of my right arm, into the softest part above the pulse.

  Two days until my next scheduled visit. And there was the iron rack to think about, and the way Perry screamed when I started with the razors.

  My mouth suddenly went dry and I put my head down, lengthening my stride. I'm not tall, but I have good long legs and I was used to trotting to keep up with Mikhail, who didn't seem to walk as much as glide between one fight and the next.

  Stop thinking about Mikhail. I made it to the exit and plunged into the cold, weary night again, hunching my shoulders, the silver tinkling in my hair.

  Chapter Three

  The precinct house on Alameda wasn't very active tonight. I nodded to the officer on duty, a tall rangy rookie who paled and looked down at his reports instead of nodding back. I placed his face with an absent mental effort—yes, he'd been in the last class I'd conducted. The one where I told each batch of shiny new faces about the nightside, and how and when to contact their local hunter.

  Or as Detective Carper calls it, "Puking Your Guts Out While Kiss Talks." Each desk has a wastebasket sitting next to it during that class, and the janitor is busy those days. Still, very few of the rookies leave the force after that little graduation ceremony. The nondisclosure clauses they sign are very rarely breached.

  Most humans don't want to know about the nightside, and they unconsciously collude in making a hunter's secrecy easy.

  I don't blame them. Some days even hunters don't want to think about what they do for a living.

  Montaigne, his dark hair rumpled, was in a pair of blue-striped pajama pants. He wore a button-up and suit jacket over them, and palmed a handful of Turns as I came into his office, his bleary dark eyes rising to meet mine. He didn't flinch at my mismatched eyes—one blue, one brown—but I noticed he wore slippers instead of his usual polished wingtips. His ankles were bare.

  Oh, God. I halted just inside his door, resting my right hand on the whip-handle. This looks bad. "Hi, Monty. Sorry I'm late, I had to drop off a Trader. What's up?"

  "Jill." His cheeks were actually cheesy-pale. "There's something I need you to take a look at."

  As usual, he sounded like he didn't quite believe he was asking a woman half his size for help. I barely come up to Monty's shoulder, but even if I gave him an Uzi and a little help he'd still be no match for me. Still, he'd never doubted my ability, once Mikhail introduced me as his apprentice.

  We're back to Mik again. Dammit, Jill, focus. "Animal, vegetable, mineral?"

  "Homicide." Most of the time, that was the case. Monty ran his hand back through his hair again. It vigorously protested this treatment, becoming even more ruffled.

  "How many bodies?" I was past uneasy and heading into full-blown disturbed. The charms in my hair tinkled, rubbing against each other. I realized I was slumping and snapped up to stand straight, dispelling the urge to yawn.

  I would be up to greet the dawn again and probably go all day, too. If I had to.

  "Five."

  A respectable number. But you're just calling me in now? "How fresh?"

  "Two hours. I'm due at the morgue as soon as you show up, Stanton's going to do the dicing." Montaigne's jaw set.

  I began to get a bad feeling, hearing the way his heart was pounding, ticking off time. He reeked of fear, not just the usual uneasiness of facing me down and being reminded of the nightside. Monty had decided he didn't want to know about anything other than when to call me, which made him wiser than most.

  "Come on, Monty. Drop the other shoe." I folded my arms. "Five bodies? Found two hours ago, or—"

  "Killed two hours ago, Kiss. And they're all cops."

  Chapter Four

  The morgue's chemical reek and fluorescent glare closed around me, and I was glad for the weight of my heavy leather coat. No matter how many autopsies I attend, the cold always seems to linger.

  Still, I'll take an autopsy over a scene any day. The dispassionate light and medical terminology helps distance the ordinary horror of death a little bit. Just a little, just enough.

  Sometimes.

  Stanton was whey-faced too, wheezing asthmatically as he shuffled down the corridor behind us, his white coat flapping from his scarecrow-thin shoulders. His hair stuck up in birdlike tufts as well, and he was fighting a miserable cold. "It looks weird, Kismet." His nose was so stuffed the sentence came out mangled. Ith lookth weirdy Kithmet.

  "How weird?" Am I going to have to kill them again? Please don't let it be scurf, or an Assyrian demon. I'm too tired for that shit. "And if it looks this weird, why weren't the bodies left onsite for me? You all know the rules."

  "They're cops." Montaigne hurried to keep up, his slippers shuffling. I kept lengthening my stride to keep him slightly behind me, just in case. "We couldn't leave 'em out there in the middle of the freeway."

  "Freeway?" This just keeps getting better and better. "Take it from the top and give me a vowel, Montaigne."

  The corridor was thankfully deserted, stretching through infinity to a pair of swinging doors at the end. Stanton's shoes squeaked against the flooring. He'd put on sneakers from two different pairs, as well as two different colors of socks—acid green and dark blue. Whatever had happened, both Monty and Stan had been dragged out of bed in a hell of a hurry.

  Of course, matching his shoes wasn't really something Stan was too concerned about. Geniuses are like that.

  "A pair of traffic cops reported something odd and called for backup at about 0200. The backup got there and reported seeing the first squad car sitting on the side of the road. After that, no communication. Dispatch kept trying to raise both of them, got no response. So another black and white goes out. By this time they called me, and I got in about 0300. The third fucking car had a rookie in it; for some reason the vet had the rookie stay in the car and went to go look for the others. Everyone was converging at that point, looked like a real cluster-fuck in progress." Montaigne stopped for a breath, his pulse thundering audibly, and dropped behind me. I slowed a little.

  "Four other cars got there at once and found the rookie bleeding quarts. Something had opened up the car like a soda can and dragged him out. He's at Luz General in trauma and last I heard it wasn't looking good. The other five—the first two teams and the vet—are all in pieces."

  Pieces? The scar was hard and throbbing against my skin, burrowing in. It never got any deeper, but the uncomfortable wondering of what it would be like if it ever did hit bone often showed up in the middle of long sleepless stakeouts, keeping me company along with Mikhail's ghost.

  "Pieces?" I sounded only mildly curious. I couldn't make any sort of guess until I'd seen the evidence, and maybe not even then. A hunter is trained thoroughly not to make any conjectures in the initial stages. You can blind yourself pretty quickly by starting out with the wrong assumption.

  A hunter blinded by assumption doesn't live long.

  "Yeah, pieces. Whatever killed them tossed them out on the Drag like garbage. In pieces. Bleeding pieces."

  Montaigne's voice dropped.

  We reached the swinging door, and I stopped short, forcing the other two to skid to a halt. "Before or after it carved the rookie up?"r />
  An acrid stink of fear wafted out from Montaigne as he and Stan paused, following procedure now. They shouldn't have brought the bodies in until I'd been able to make sure they were truly dead and not just incubating something.

  Monty reached across his wide chest, touched his sidearm, clasped in its holster under his armpit. "We don't know."

  Jesus Christ I took a deep breath, motioned them both back. "All right, boys. Let big bad Kismet go in and see what the monster left us."

  Montaigne actually flinched, but he understood. It sounds brutal and callous, but a hunter learns mighty quick to take the gallows humor where she finds it. Just like a cop.

  It's the only way to keep from suicide or weeping, and sometimes it doesn't work. That's when you start drinking, or getting some random sex.

  See what I mean?

  I came through low and sweeping with both guns as the swinging doors banged against the walls on either side.

  Nothing but the tables and hard tiled floor of a ghastly-lit body bay, each table now full. It had been a busy night in Santa Luz. The five bags on the left-hand side were all shapeless, looking wrong even through heavy vinyl. The bodies on the right were bagged and normal, if there is any such thing as a normal dead body.

  It used to bother me that each bag was a life, the sum of someone's breathing and walking around carrying a soul.

  Then the things that bothered me were details. Hair left crusted with blood, a missing earring, a bruise that had half-healed and would never fade now, or—worst of all—the smaller bags.

  The ones for children.

  I took a deep breath and smelled something I didn't expect—the sweetish brackish rotting of hellbreed, added to another smell I hadn't expected. A dry smell, blazing with heat and spoiled musk, like matted fur and unhealthy dandruff-clotted skin. My nose wrinkled. I took another deep whiff, sniffing all the way down to the bottom of my lungs and examining the bags with both eyes. My smart eye, the blue one, saw no stirring or unevenness hovering in the ether over the bodies. My dumb eye, the brown one, ticked over their contours and returned a few impressions I wasn't sure I liked.