"Then it is her I will help, Kinslayer. Draw your minions away."
The heavy spiked agony in my belly crested again, and the bony hands of a starving demon clamped down with inhuman strength. A hissing breath of effort filled my ears, and I screamed as the weight was suddenly torn from me in a rush of blood and battered viscera.
Leander yelled. Lucas let out a shout of surprise, and the sounds smashed the calm of the temple's interior. I curled around myself, endlessly grateful for the cessation of pain, and passed out for one brief starry moment as chaos erupted around me.
Chapter 8
The water was full of knives, and as I thrashed it drained away, liquid weightlessness replaced by the agony of cutting.
No. You can't go yet.A familiar voice, the words laid directly inside my consciousness, as I struggled to escape, flesh a prison and my soul the struggling captive, digging her way out with broken fingernails as sharp edges pressed into numb flesh, invading.
Blue flame rose, the entrance to the land of Death, and not even the fact that my god might well deny me the comfort and rational clear light of What Comes Next could deter me. I strained toward that blue glow.
There are times when Death is not an adventure, but an escape from a life descended too far into Hell. Any hell. Not yet. Maddeningly, the voice barred my way. The knives retreated, my skin still numb. I couldn't tell if I was bleeding or just cold, if I was standing or lying down, if I was alive or something else.
Then the light came, a sharp living light, not the glow of What Comes Next that lifts the soul up and away on a streak of brilliance. This was a human light, and as I blinked I heard the sound of dragging footsteps on wet stone and felt arms around me, stick-thin but very strong. I blinked again. A dizzying moment of vertigo, and the world came into focus, into clear heartstopping detail. The light was coming through the window.
Along the edge of each window ran a thin line of gold. It poured through each pane of glass, a curtain of sunshine dancing with infinite dust-motes.
It should not have surprised me to see sunshine when I dreamed of Jason Monroe.
He sat cross-legged on the floor, looking up with mild interest, blue eyes catching fire under the flood of light. It glowed in his hair, a human furnace of gold, and he was again the young Jace of the first violent flush of our affair. The Bolgari chronograph glittered on his wrist, and he wore a white T-shirt, muscle flickering underneath as he lifted the sword a little, balancing it on his palms.
The room was a surprise. It was Jado's room, the room at the top of the stairs where my sensei gave out his prized swords, one at a time, to his most trusted students. Only here, the wooden racks along the wall were empty, and the mellow hardwood floor was scratched and scarred, white paint on the walls chipped. The window was bare, and the hall beyond the open doorway stood empty as a soymalt 40 can rolling down the street.
"Nice." Jace was barefoot, in jeans, and the fine golden hairs on his forearms glistened in the light. "I like this venue, too."
He actually spoke, instead of the words being laid in my head like a gift. And no wonder the voice that called me away from Death was familiar, for it was his.
Breath left me in a walloping rush. I sank down to the floor, finding myself in a tattered blue sweater, ripped jeans showing pale human skin underneath. In these dreams, I was human again. My nails were painted red with molecule-drip, and my hair was tangled, dull with black dye, and full of split ends. "I'm not dead." Three words, through the lump of misery in my throat, forced out despite myself.
It dawned on me, through the fog of light and the good smell of dust and paint and fresh air, as if the room breathed summer wind through every crack. "And I don't think I'm really dreaming," I whispered.
His grin widened, the smile that had brought no shortage of female attention his way. "Got it in one, sunshine. We have a little time, here. A little space."
"I miss you." The simple truth of it frightened me, took shape in the air, looming invisibly behind thick syrupy golden light. "Why are you doing this? Why didn't you let me die?"
"You're being dense. What else would I do for you?" A shrug, his face turning solemn. The sword eased back down, into his lap, across his knees.
It was his dotanuki, the sword broken by the shock of his death. Not precisely broken, just twisted into a corkscrew and leaking agony into the air, the agony of a soul ripped from its moorings by a Feeder's ka. My eyes traced the familiar scabbard, and every question I had never asked him rose in my throat and stung my eyes.
"Gabe," I whispered. "Eddie."
"You did the right thing." His hand twitched, as if he would reach forward to touch me. Then it relaxed, and his fingers trailed over the familiar wrapped hilt. "It isn't like you to kill a defenseless woman, Danny. You would have hated yourself for it. Later, that is. When you calmed down."
I shook my head. "That's not what I meant." And he still hadn't answered me. Why would he call me back of all people? He was dead too.
I'd failed him just as surely as I'd failed everyone else.
"You wanted to ask if I see them. I can't tell you that, you know that. Go into Death and ask for yourself, that's your question." He sighed. "You're always asking the wrong fucking questions, baby."
"When did you get so goddamn shallow?" I flung back at him. It was easy, the reflex of a fight. Always better to fight him — I have always been more afraid of the damage a soft word could do.
I suppose he might have even understood that he was the only person I had ever fought so hard.
The question was, had he understood it while he was alive?
"You're a lousy Shaman. Loawork better when they're cajoled."
"You're not a loa." I was fairly certain of that, at least. Had he been one of the spirits the vaudun Shamans of the world traffic with, he wouldn't have bothered to wear someone else's face. I've only caught glimpses of them, since they have little use for Necmmances. But no loawould appear in another skin here, in whatever dreamspace this was.
They do not dress, while they are at home. "Other people get loa. You get me."
It dawned on me in slow stages. I stared at him, at the bump on his nose, where a break from a bounty he'd run with me as apprentice and backup had gone horribly wrong in Freetown Hongkong. We had just barely made it out of there alive, and he had never bothered to get the break in his nose bonescrubbed. No, I'd set it with a healcharm, and he'd left the tiny imperfection there, saying it would teach him to be more careful when facing a bounty with a laserifle in close quarters.
"Like a familiar?" I hazarded, prickles spilling down my back. Lucifer had given me Japhrimel as a familiar, long ago. I knew most of the rules where a demon familiar was involved, except for maybe the one about letting the demon fall in love with you.
But what are the rules when your dead boyfriend shows up as a meddling spirit?
"Like, and unlike." He nodded approvingly, his fingers smoothing the hilt. It was a familiar movement. Whenever he rode transport or discussed the finer points of hunting bounties, his fingers would move, slightly. On a swordhilt, on the butt of a gun… or on my hip, gently, as we shared a bed late at night.
Long, long ago. Before Japhrimel. Before everything. I couldn't help myself. I had to. "Japhrimel."