Don’t worry, I wanted to say. I fixed it. I stopped him. He won’t hurt you now.

The faint voice of rationality piped up. This was a Sorrow, the one who had killed my teacher. What the hell was I doing protecting her?

She’s still a woman. And no woman deserves Perry, dammit. Or gang-rape by hellbreed. “Saul.” My voice cracked, my throat denying itself a killing scream. “Go get the car warmed up.”

“Jill—”

Goddammit, Saul, I’m not safe right now. I think I just did something stupid. “Do it.”

He got up, I heard the couch squeak. Then he was gone. I heard the front door slam as I stepped back from the Sorrow who hunched in the chair, her hair falling forward over her face. The smell of rotting blood cooking in a gun barrel painted the air. My hands were shaking. Point blank, you shot him point blank, hope that’s enough. Pray that’s enough.

And under that, the other thought, repeating like a bad record. No more. Not to another woman. No fucking more.

“Belisa?” I still sound like a stranger. What have I done? “Melisande?”

Her shoulders were still shaking. And God help me, but my fingers tightened on the gun again, and it was all I could do not to shoot her too.

“Goddammit, get up. Let’s go. We’ve got a world to save, you Chaldean bitch.”

Then her face tipped up, her black eyes meeting mine, and I saw she was laughing. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and she smiled, a death’s-head grin that told me she was having a hell of a good time. Her hand stabbed forward, the broken glass ampoule spewing something that smelled oddly sweet; my body sagged, not hitting the floor because of her slim iron arms around my waist. Her fingers were at my throat, I heard a snap as she tore the ruby away and tossed it, its sweet chime as it hit the floor. I choked on the poison and heard her laughter ring in the rafters. She laughed as if she had just heard the world’s funniest joke.

Laughed, in fact, fit to die.

Blackness. I floated.

I’m dead. Any minute now I’ll see Hell again. I’ll sink into it, and they’ll start on me, every hellbreed I’ve killed, everyone I’ve laid to rest. I’ll start screaming, and it will never end, and I’ll be back on the streetcorner with the wind on the back of my legs and that car coming toward me. I will. In a moment. When I finish being dead.

Something hard against my back. Cold hardness seeping into my skin. My nerves were on fire with pain, creeping up my arms and legs. Any minute now I would wake up to find myself in Hell. There was no reason to fight it. I was dead.

Dead. Floating in a blackness that started to sting in all my fingers and toes, as if I was wrestling with a jellyfish.

Belisa. The traitorous bitch.

Did she kill me? Why? She wanted me for a diversion so she could take out this Inez bitch.

Didn’t she?

A nagging little idea began growing in the back of my mind. I tried to push it away, to concentrate on being dead, but it wouldn’t go away.

The file on you is red-flagged for a reason. She had given a picture-perfect imitation of being scared to death of Perry, and she probably had been. One false move, one note out of tune, and he might have killed her before he could bring her to me. I certainly wouldn’t put it past him. But she’d had an ampoule of something. Poison, the Sorrows trademark. Poison in word, deed, and fact.

Belisa knew too much. This was, again, Mikhail’s voice. Far too much. How she know what the redhead bitch is planning? And here is thought, milaya, is there reason why you haven’t seen zis redhead Sorrow yet? There’s such a thing as wigs.

But that made no sense, did it? Nothing about this made much sense.

Wake up, kitten. The tone of my conscience changed, mutated into a voice I knew as well as my own, deep and soft. Saul’s voice, whispered in my ear. At least he’d been outside when Belisa made her move. Time to wake up. Come on.

But I was dead, and I was so tired. So goddamn tired of it all. Being a hunter is just one disgusting fight after another, and there were endlessly inventive ways people could be shot, stabbed, tortured, burned, hurt. Every hunter got tired of seeing it, even if we were luckier than the cops who only dealt with humans. A hunter had to remind himself—or herself—about why we did this. Why we put ourselves through this.

Well, why, cream puff? This time the voice wasn’t Saul’s or Mikhail’s. It was another voice, one I knew very well, the voice of a man who had picked up a lonely shivering girl and made her feel worthwhile, made her feel loved, before he’d turned her out on the street and set her to earning her keep. Why d’ya do it at all, then?

I didn’t want to hear Val; I’d killed him. I pushed that voice away with an effort so hard it felt physical, heard a shapeless sound. It sounded like someone was moaning, coming to, swimming up out of dark water. Metal clashed, and the fierce cold against my back and my heels ratcheted up another notch. It burned across my buttocks, my shoulders, digging into the back of my head and my neck. And the inside of my right wrist hurt, a sharp stabbing pain.

Oh, shit. Maybe I wasn’t dead.

Val’s voice wouldn’t go away. Why d’ya do it, babydoll? Huh? You don’t do it to save the world or any fucking shit like that. You want to know why you put yourself through this?

I pushed that voice away again. I knew why I did it. I didn’t need to be reminded.

Why are you a hunter, kitten? Saul’s voice, on the edge of breaking. We did fight, sometimes volcanically, and he had asked me once or twice why I seemed so determined to fling myself into the worst trouble I could find. There’s no retirement plan for hunters—none of us live that long. There’s also no Higher Authority, even though the Church trains a lot of us. If a hunter wants to quit he just quits, just disappears. You aren’t a hunter because you’re forced into it, or because you fill out an application and have to find a replacement.

No, a hunter chooses to put his body on the line. And each hunt is another conscious choice. Nobody would blame you if you stopped, backed out, laid down the sword, and walked away. As a matter of fact, that was the sanest option—part of finding an apprentice is doing everything possible to dissuade the candidate from even thinking about taking the training.

We all do zis for one reason, milaya. It is for to quiet ze screaming in our dreams. It is for to kill our own demons. And they call us heroes. Idiots. Mikhail, again. Why was I hearing voices? I could even smell him. Vodka metabolizing out through the skin, the smell of someone raised in a different climate, foreign darkness and the smell of his hair as he leaned over me to correct my form, the copper charms tied in his hair tinkling sweetly.

His voice dropped to a whisper in the very center of my head. Now is time for ze waking up, milaya. Wake up.

I didn’t want to. I wanted only to drift. But the stinging in my fingers and toes sharpened, as if they were coming back to life.

As if I was coming back to life.

If you do not wake up, milaya, I will hit you.

I lunged into consciousness, fully aware and awake, because when Mikhail said that he never lied. Metal clashed as I tried to leap to my feet, springing up—and was grabbed mercilessly at wrists and ankles, my head hitting cold stone as I was yanked back. Stars slammed through my head, actual bright points of light.

Shit. Oh shit.

I was on my back on cold, hard stone that felt glassy, like obsidian. And I was chained, the cold cuffs closed around ankles and wrists. Stretched out like a virgin sacrifice.

Well, if that’s what they wanted they certainly have the wrong girl. My forlorn little laugh half-choked its way out of my throat, I blinked, breathed in a long lungful of air so cold it burned, and looked around.