Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(14)

Raz smiled, though maybe he was just gritting his teeth.

Then he hit Varg hard in the face with the back of his head.

Varg’s nose shattered. Her knife tore into his neck. He fell, limp. Varg staggered, and in that second Cat leapt on her, threw her into the wall, hit her in the face, the jaw, doubled her over her knee. Varg crumpled and lay still, though breathing.

Cat ran to Raz.

Blood poured down his collar, a red scarf over his bleach-white shirt. His hand rose, trembling, to his neck, but could not reach.

She knelt beside him, took his wrist, felt the direction he wanted it to go, and pressed his hand against his wound. His teeth were white and sharp.

She shed her jacket, unbuttoned her shirt cuff, and pushed it up. Scars marked on her forearm, paired pinpricks, long gashes, faded, yes, but there was only so much a year could heal. If she was younger, they might have healed completely.

She raised her wrist to his mouth. His nostrils flared. There was a need in her—gods, such a need—hunger for the fullness she’d abandoned a year ago, but she found herself here anyway, in the alley, so weak.

His fangs bared.

She shivered in anticipation.

He pressed his lips together, shook his head.

She slumped beside him. “You really.” She was breathing hard, and not from the run. “You really should let me know what can kill you.”

“I’m.” His first try was wet and windy at once. He spit blood onto the pavement. “I’m not exactly sure. Extended sunlight, probably. Decapitation. It’s not like there’s a manual. And only dumb kids go around trying to off themselves.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s an existentialist thing.”

“Never did trust philosophy.” A pause, in which she failed again to find her breath. “You didn’t know you’d survive that?”

“I’ve had my throat slit before. I don’t experiment, but other people always seem happy to oblige.”

“Pirate.”

“Cop.”

She shrugged. “Thanks.”

“Hells. Now we have her, you have an excuse to take her ship. That’s the real prize. Rescue the people she’s smuggling, save the day. And I needed to work on my tan.”

She punched him in the arm. He winced.

Inside her, the pit still yawned, and beneath that pit, another, deeper.





7

The goddess addressed Cat in the shower, in her mother’s voice.

Catherine, why do you turn from me?

Oh, I don’t know if I turn from you as such, she replied as she shampooed. We have a close working relationship.

You live inside my body, yet we don’t talk like I do with my children.

I barely had my life figured out working with Justice. Then you came along.

You visited back alley bloodsucker dens for the thrill of being drunk. Does that constitute having your life figured out?

I didn’t say I had it figured well. Just figured. She soaped down, rinsed off, turned into the shower spray. I was raised to think you were dead, and a traitor. Your children were my childhood ghosts.

That isn’t my fault.

She shut off the water, reached blind for her towel, and rubbed herself dry.

I can help you. We can be closer than the structure of Justice allows. You are a priestess. You have made a vow. You could perform miracles.

Miracles aren’t my job.

The voice did not answer. Somewhere beneath her feet, the moon smiled.

She had a fresh change of clothes in her locker, and as she put it on she convinced herself she felt clean.

*

She was halfway through the paperwork on the morning’s raid when a duty officer—Cramden, she thought, beneath the Suit—came to tell her Tara Abernathy was looking for her. “Send her back,” Cat said, and watched him go, smooth and assured, rippling silver.

She hadn’t made progress on the paperwork when the door opened again. She looked up from the form, exasperated. “How do you spell ‘ceiling’?”

Tara wrote the glyphs in air with her fingertip and shut the door behind her. “Long day?”

“Two long days,” she said, “and it’s only one thirty. It’ll be four long days before I’m done.”

“I need you at a meeting tonight.”

“Can’t. I have an operation. And this.” She fanned the forms.

“Paperwork,” Tara said, skeptical. She paced the confines of Cat’s office, and “confines” was the right word: a cubbyhole of the Temple of Justice intended for solitary monastics meditating on their Lady. A bas-relief of a robed woman occupied one wall, its eyes notched out with a clean chisel strike. What light there was shafted through high slit windows; there had been more direct sun before they built the bank next door. “Why do you need after-action reports? Justice is in your head.”

“Paperwork makes us more than just another gang. In the year since Seril came back, it’s grown more important than ever. She has opinions—Justice didn’t.”

“Justice claimed she didn’t. Study her arrest record and you’ll see patterns emerge. Not nice patterns, either.”

“At least she was fair.”

“She arrested me for treason. You’ll excuse me if I don’t share your estimation of her impartiality.”