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"So," he said. "Looks like you caught me out. What now?"
"I don't know." Rache shrugged. "We go back to work?"
Fontaine lifted an eyebrow. "You're not gonna turn me in?"
She laughed. "Fuck, no. I'm blackmailing you. I like this job. So you're gonna give the Order glowing reports about what a natural talent I am."
She stood beside him, reached up, and patted his arm.
"We're going to make a great team, partner."
He limped along, smiling, shaking his head, and she followed at his side.
"You'll have to earn your keep," he told her. "If you're gonna have my back, we'd better teach you right."
"Hey, as long as the money keeps flowing. So, Ada. I don't get it. Helping a human, risking your own neck like that? Not to mention the money you could have made by selling her to the prince. All that work and you got nothing for it. Why'd you do it, anyway?"
Fontaine cupped his hand over his eyes and squinted into the distance. An empty crosstown bus rattled past, spitting black exhaust into the frigid predawn air, the city rousing from its slumber and waiting for the morning light, still one dark hour away.
"Same reason a man does anything worth doing, Rache. Same reason anything's ever worth doing."
KISS
LILITH SAINTCROW
Readers of the Jill Kismet series will recognize Perry--a character whom the author has often said makes her want to scrub herself with a wire brush every time he shows up. Santa Luz's resident hellbreed leader has a long history, and a long entanglement with Jill's line of hunters. The hunters battle the things that go bump in the night, and Jill herself made a bargain with her own personal devil to gain the strength to bump back. What she didn't know, of course, was just how far that bargain would take her. One suspects her teacher, and his teacher before him, didn't either.
POWER
February 7, 1945
My kind does not often traffic with the righteous. Oh, there are plenty of churchgoers who come to us, hands clasped, begging for a Trade. We do not drive overly hard bargains; we do our best to turn none away. We are, as my un-father once remarked, charitable indeed. We ask so little, especially of those we favor.
Just a hairsbreadth. Just a tiny, tiny crack.
There are exceptions. For a sizable gift, a sizable sacrifice is required. You must agree that's only fair. Even then, we will offer more; it's in your nature to accept a good deal.
So I kept the appointment, passing swiftly between you sacks of flesh carrying your sweet, struggling essential sparks, trapped in a thick liquid you call time and an even thicker fog of your petty little desires. That night a thin, fine rain fell from a gunmetal sky onto cobbled and paved streets, Dresden swollen with cold and refugees fleeing the inferno in the east. The lesser inferno to the west was far preferable, but the roads were choked and the Feldgendarmerie roamed hungrily, shooting those they suspected of desertion, defeatism, or disgust.
The chaos and misery were a warm bath. A beer house beckoned; I plunged into its smoky, crowded fog and found he had arrived early.
Blue-eyed and wheat-haired, in a long leather coat probably stolen from some Schutzie, the hunter slumped in a defensible corner with a clear line to the bar and, hence, the back door. They are very careful, those righteous ones, for all they have is the stink of murder and the fume of our homeland dyeing their physical fibers.
Their nightly murders are, of course, justified by the damage certain citizens of the night cause the sacks of flesh and nerves inhabiting this little backwater.
To gain the strength to fight us, the hunters ascend to our plane, and call it Hell. The true name is unpronounceable to your strange-shaped human tongues, since it must be pronounced inwardly as well as out.
Above all, our home gives you what you expect to find. It is the grandest joke in centuries, that they think we are invaders.
Anyway, the man permitted himself a single wrinkle of his aquiline nose. I'd arrived early, too; he who chooses the battlefield first naturally takes the best position. A hush followed my entrance, swirling around me as I pulled out the chair opposite, letting him think my back to the door presumed a measure of trust.
In a crisp black tailored uniform with a silver skull or two, my back ramrod straight, I was the very picture of a Schutzie myself, platinum hair shaved
at the sides and back, my eyes just as blue as a recruiting poster's muscled paragon. A high-ranking true-blooded soldier, with an uncertain temper and a thin-lipped smile.
I suspected my appearance would irritate him. But I like to dress well, and my coloring, inherited from my quasi-father, carried certain advantages in this milieu.
"Great." His German was flawless, his accent pure Berliner. He'd been practicing. "So much for passing unremarked."
