Dead Man's Trigger

Chapter 8: A Desperate Dash

The stairwell door slammed shut behind her, and the sirens dropped to a dull wail. Mephisto ran down the rain-dark alley in her bare feet, the thin hospital gown plastered to her skin, too focused on the man in the long coat to feel the cold.

A Soul Eater.

She hadn't seen one in fifty years. The last had tracked her to a village in the Alps, and when it was over his soul had tasted like ash.

This one had stood in front of her with his pistols raised and his finger tight on the trigger, and then a child had screamed and he had lowered both guns as if she'd stopped existing.

She had watched the light on his wrist flash red just before he did it. Whatever they'd given him, it had failed at the worst possible moment, and he hadn't cared.

Nobody in her long history had ever lowered a weapon for someone else. Her mind kept circling back to it, to the way his face had changed, and she couldn't tell whether it should frighten her or not.

Her apartment sat above a laundromat at the edge of the campus district.

She went in through the fire escape and locked the deadbolt, and for a moment she stood in the dark listening to the dryers thump below. It was a small, plain room. A cheap desk, a lamp, a stack of casebooks, and a legal brief due Friday that she hadn't finished.

To anyone else she was a quiet, brilliant twenty-three-year-old who never went out. She had almost started to believe it herself.

She pulled up the loose floorboard under the desk and took out the book. It looked like an old photo album, but the pages were thin sheets of dull metal that hummed faintly when she touched them.

She sat on the edge of the bed and pressed her palm to the first blank page. Light bled from her fingertips, and slowly a face burned itself into the metal: Craig Seven, half his face hidden behind a black mask, his eyes looking straight at her.

She turned back through the older pages. Each one held a face, every Soul Eater who had ever been sent for her, and they all wore the same flat, emptied expression. Seven's eyes were the only ones in the book that looked alive.

She closed it and put it in the duffel with the cash and the forged papers. Her cover had burned with the hospital, and she wasn't leaving anything of hers behind. She pulled on a black hoodie and boots and went out into the rain.

The eastbound train was crowded with people trying to get home. She stood against the door with her hood low and the album pressed against her hip, and rode until the stops became stations no one used anymore.

At the last one she climbed down onto the tracks and followed the maintenance tunnels to a steel door behind a rusted steam pipe. She knocked in the pattern she always used.

The door opened onto warm, dim light and the low glow of a wall of monitors. Kirk Dane was already there.

She had been up all night, Mephisto could tell from the coffee cups and the police scanner muttering in the corner, and she didn't say a word before crossing the room, lifting Mephisto off her feet, and pinning her gently against the wall.

"You're late," Kirk said against her mouth, and kissed her.

It had been three weeks. Mephisto let the duffel slide to the floor and dragged her hands into Kirk's hair, and for a while nothing existed but the heat of her, the solid warmth of a person who had never once been afraid of what she was. Kirk's hands slid under the hoodie and stopped at the bruises on her ribs, and she pulled back just far enough to look.

"Smoke," Kirk said quietly. "Ozone. And this." She traced a bruise with her thumb. "Somebody got to you."

"Somebody tried."

Kirk waited. She knew better than to push.

"They sent another one." Mephisto's voice sounded strange in her own ears, and she pressed her forehead against Kirk's collarbone. "I saw the whole thing, Kirk. He had a clear shot. He had me, and he let me go."

Kirk's jaw set. She had heard the story of the last hunter more than once, and she had spent years preparing for the day another one came. The go-bag by the door sat packed for years. She had already moved money, changed two safe houses, and put out a quiet feeler to a man who owed her a favor.

"Why would one of them let you go?" she asked.

Mephisto slid the album out of the duffel and laid it on the table, opened to the newest page. Seven's image looked up at them, alive among the dead.

"That's what I need to know," she said.