Redemption Alley by Lilith Saintcrow

Author:Lilith Saintcrow [Saintcrow, Lilith]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: FIC009010
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2009-08-02T18:30:00+00:00

19

Leon drove, of all things, a big blue Chevy half-ton. The interior smelled of grease and jostled as the engine labored.

“This thing needs a tune-up,” I told him. “What the hell are you doing here? Not that I’m not happy to see you.”

“Where the fuck’s your car, darlin’? And I’m here because you called, and because someone’s been trappin’ scurf in my neck of the woods. I wouldn’t mind, since we got enough and to spare, but trappin’ ’em means they have somethin’ planned, and that I don’t like. I tracked ’em over the city limits. We got ourselves a genuine grade-A problem goin’ on here.”

“My car blew up. What do you mean, trapping scurf?” I clung to the oh-shit strap while he took a corner, working the gears like they were going out of style. Beer cans rolled around my ankles and a metal footlocker containing ammo and various other odds and ends rattled, sliding forward to smack my boots.

Then Leon did something I hated. He closed his eyes.

Oh shit.

I came back from Hell with a gift or a curse, depending on which way you look at it. My blue eye can see between and below the surface of the world. It is that ability to go between that sets me apart from other hunters—that and my bargain with Perry. Most of us just come back from Hell with some interesting instincts, a grasp of sorcery, and the ability to see through the masks hellbreed like to wear.

But some of us return with more.

Leon came back a tracker. You name it, he can follow it. All it requires, he says, is the right mindset.

And a healthy amount of Pabst Blue Ribbon to dull his sensitivity the rest of the time. If Budge wasn’t half-drunk, things were very bad indeed. The only good thing about it was he needed a bathroom about as often as a female hunter does.

Beer does that to you when you’ve got a human metabolism. Me, I can’t drink enough of the damn stuff to even get a buzz.

I didn’t ask who we were following. Leon had seen Carp, unmistakably human and bleeding in the middle of a hellbreed haunt, and had further seen me unwilling to leave without him. Some things are just understood.

Leon floored it, and the pickup began to shimmy in interesting ways. “Movin’ fast, and agin the wind.”

Not like wind matters to Traders or hellbreed, Leon. I hung on for dear life as he slammed us through traffic, missing a semi by bare inches and almost dinging the paint job on a showroom-bright black SUV that blared its horn and dropped back. Leon’s eyelids flickered like he was dreaming.

“What do you mean, trapping scurf?” I repeated. That was bad, bad news on all fronts.

“I mean catching the little bastards and shipping them out of town, both by rail and by water. I didn’t think it was possible—who the hell would want ’em, huh? Hang on.”

Hang on?

Leon twisted the wheel, hard. We cut across two lanes of traffic, he floored it, and I started to feel a little green.

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