Darkness Calls Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  EVERYONE’S LOVING THE MAXINE KISS NOVELS

  BY “RED-HOT LIU”*

  “Marjorie M. Liu writes a gripping supernatural thriller.”

  —The Best Reviews

  “The boundlessness of Liu’s imagination never ceases to amaze; her ability to translate that imagination into a lyrical work of art never ceases to impress.”—Booklist

  “Raises the bar for all others competing in its league . . . Liu’s screenplay-worthy dialogue, vivid action, and gift for the punchy, unexpected metaphor rocket her tale high above the pack. Readers of early Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, and the best thrillers out there should try Liu now and catch a rising star.”—Publishers Weekly

  “Nonstop adventure . . . a rich world with paranormal elements.” —SFRevu

  “Red-hot Liu . . . packs her stories with immensely intriguing characters, making the high-stakes plotlines even more mesmerizing.”—*Romantic Times

  “I adore the Hunter Kiss series! Marjorie Liu’s writing is both lyrical and action packed, which is a very rare combination. Heroine Maxine Kiss and her demon friends are wonderful characters who are as likable as they are fierce. You’ll want to read this series over and over.”

  —Angela Knight, New York Times bestselling author

  “Fabulous romantic-suspense fantasy that will hook the audience from the first note to the incredible climactic coda.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “A wonderful voice.”—Romance at Heart Magazine

  “Readers who love urban fantasies like those of Charlaine Harris or Kim Harrison will relish Marjorie M. Liu’s excellent adventure. This is the superb start of a dynamic-looking saga.”—Midwest Book Review

  “Liu is masterful in merging espionage, romance, and the supernatural into fiction that goes beyond the boundaries of action-adventure romance or romantic suspense.”—Booklist

  “Ms. Liu does a lovely job in . . . preparing us for the highspeed action in her demon-filled adventure. A creative and well-written story line provides a strong backbone for this new urban fantasy series, and the unique characters in The Iron Hunt will charm, tempt, and surprise readers into coming back for more.”—Darque Reviews

  “A stunning new series . . . The mythology is fascinating, the characters complicated, the story lines original. I’m a big fan of Liu’s Dirk & Steele series, but this one surpasses even it.”—Fresh Fiction

  Ace Books by Marjorie M. Liu

  THE IRON HUNT

  DARKNESS CALLS

  eSpecials

  HUNTER KISS

  Anthologies

  WILD THING

  (with Maggie Shayne, Alyssa Day, and Meljean Brook)

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

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  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  DARKNESS CALLS

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Ace mass-market edition / July 2009

  Copyright © 2009 by Marjorie M. Liu.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-06042-1

  ACE

  Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For the nomads, the rootless, and the free . . .

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Every book I write is a journey, and I’d like to thank the following people who have traveled this novel’s path alongside me:

  My wonderful editor, Kate Seaver—and my equally fantastic agent, Lucienne Diver. All the good people at Berkley who have made this series possible, especially Leslie Gelbman and Susan Allison. My copy editors, Bob and Sara Schwager. My friends and family, who still giggle at this job I have—and my lovely readers, who support me in countless kind ways.

  I’d like to thank Adam Minter, as well, for being a wealth of information about St. Ignatius Cathedral in Shanghai, China—and for always taking the time to answer my questions.

  To learn more about the Hunter Kiss series, please visit my website at www.marjoriemliu.com.

  Though my soul may set in darkness,

  it will rise in perfect light;

  I have loved the stars too fondly

  to be fearful of the night.

  —SARAH WILLIAMS, “THE OLD ASTRONOME R TO HIS PUPIL”

  CHAPTER 1

  ZOMBIES had a bad habit of shooting me in the head. Most of them knew better, but there was always that one who wanted to get lucky.

  It was a wet Monday morning. Almost dawn. Broken streetlights and glass in the road; and the hulking shadows of abandoned warehouses towering above me. Dead city, dead hour. Seattle was a dark place, even with the sun. Some days felt like living in the aftermath of a nuclear winter; as though a mushroom cloud had blown over and never left.

  Quiet, too. Nothing to hear except harsh breathing, a soft whine; my cowboy boots scuffing concrete and the sharpening of claws; and the rumble of the freight trains at the rail yard across from the docks, mingling
with the growls vibrating softly in my ears: baby symphonies of thunder. Good music. Made me feel safe.

  I rubbed wet hair out of my eyes. “Zee. Hold him tighter.”

  Him. Archie Limbaud. Scrawny man, sinewy as a garter snake, saddled with a crown of short brown hair plastered to his soaked skin and flecked with enormous flakes of dandruff. He was a fortysomething man who smelled like the private bathroom of a teenage boy: unwashed and vaguely fecal.

  He was also a zombie. Not the brain-eating, shambling kind, either. Not a corpse. Just a man, possessed by a demon—who was using his body like a puppet. Practically the same as being dead, if you asked me.

  I did not want to touch him. He sprawled on the edge of an empty parking lot, crammed against the bottom of a chain-link fence, the contents of his wallet scattered on the ground in front of me. More condoms than cash, along with one credit card, and an expired driver’s license. Minutes ago, there had been a gun—a .40-caliber pistol, pointed at my head—but that was gone now. Eaten.

  I hated guns. I hated zombies. Put those together with what I knew about the possessed man at my feet, and I didn’t know whether to cry, scream, or kick the fuck out of his testes.

  I eased off my gloves, shoved them in my back pocket, and extended my palm. A sharp little hand passed me a switchblade. Pretty thing, with a mother-of-pearl handle and silver accents. Razor edge, still wet with blood. Engraved with the initials A.L. I waved it in front of Archie’s ruddy face, and his dark aura fluttered wildly around the crown of his head.

  “Some night,” I said quietly. “I found the body.”

  Archie said nothing. Part of that might have been the aluminum baseball bat pressed down on his throat. Stolen from the Seattle Mariners, if I had to guess. I could see the stadium walls of Safeco Field from where I crouched, and Zee and the others were going through a baseball phase. Babe Ruth was in; Bill Russell was out. Which pained me. At least my boys were still obsessed with Bon Jovi. I couldn’t have handled that much change.

  Zee, Raw, and Aaz were down on the ground, pinning Archie to the pavement. Little demons, little hounds. Rain sizzled, trickling down bony backs the color of soot smeared with silver, skin shimmering with a muscular fluidity that resembled water more than flesh. Razor-sharp spines of hair flexed against chiseled skulls while silver veins pulsed with slow beats that, if I had pressed my ear close, would have sounded like the steady thrums of bass guitars.

  Red eyes glinted. I used the switchblade to tap Aaz on the back of the head, and his hair cut through the steel as if it were butter. Raw caught the bits of blade before they hit the pavement and stuffed them in his mouth, chewing loudly.

  “Ease up on the windpipe,” I said to Aaz. “I don’t want the host harmed.”

  Aaz blew a kiss at the zombie and removed the baseball bat from his soft, bruised throat. Archie started coughing, fighting to move his legs. No luck. Raw was sitting on his ankles, and Zee had his wrists pinned to the pavement. Not quite crushing bone, but close. My boys were strong.

  “Please,” Archie whispered hoarsely. “I want to convert.”

  “Liar,” rasped Zee, before I had a chance to tell the zombie to go fuck himself. The little demon leaned close to lick the air above Archie’s brow. “Cutter lies, Maxine. He still hungers.”

  “He murders,” I said, gripping the remains of the switchblade in my fist as a young face flashed through my mind, bloody and sliced, long brown limbs naked, splayed. Torn doll. Torn in places I did not want to remember. “She was just a kid.”

  “She was a prostitute,” Archie said. “She was already prey.”

  Dek and Mal, coiled heavy on my shoulders, peered from beneath my hair and hissed at the zombie. Unlike the others, they were built like snakes, with two vestigial limbs good only for clutching my ears. Heads shaped like hyenas. Sharp smiles. Fire in their breath. Archie stared at them, and trembled.

  I reached through his thunderous aura to place my hand on his clammy brow. He shied away, but the boys held tight, and in that last moment before I touched him, his eyes rolled back, staring at the delicate armor surrounding the entire ring finger of my right hand: a slender sheath of quicksilver, replete with a delicate joint at the knuckle, which allowed my finger to bend. Fit like a skin. Sometimes I forgot it was there.

  “Prey,” I murmured. “And what does that make you?”

  “One of a million,” he whispered, shaking; staring at me with hate in his eyes. “You can’t kill us all. When the prison walls fail—”

  “You’ll be rat meat to the rest of the demons,” I interrupted, still thinking of the girl I had found in an alley only blocks from here, summoned to her still-warm body by Zee and the others, who had roused me from bed to hunt her killer. “Your kind will be slaughtered, just like the humans. You’re nothing to the others. Even your Queen has said so.”

  “Hunter—” Archie began, but I didn’t let him finish. I knew everything he was going to say. I had heard it thousands of times since my mother’s murder, and thousands of times before that, as well.

  I was going to die. I was never going to reach old age. The world was going to end.

  All of which was true. But, whatever. His voice hurt my head. His sour scent, hot and prickly, made me want to vomit. I was tired, and cold all the way through to my soul, and there was a girl who had lost her life tonight for no good reason. She had suffered a bad death—and only because the parasite possessing this man had wanted to feed on her pain. I did not even know her name. No ID, no nothing. Lost forever.

  Not the only one, either. The world was a big place. Too many predators: human, zombie, or otherwise. And just one of me. Nomad, born and bred, who had settled in this city longer than any other. Abandoning all others, so I could have some semblance of a normal life.

  Right. Normal.

  I ground my palm even harder against Archie’s brow, and exhaled a soft hiss of words: sibilant and ancient, a focused tongue that made my skin tingle, and my hand burn. Archie’s breath rattled, and he strained upward as his aura swelled, trying to escape me.

  No such luck. The demon was young. Easy to exorcise. I drew it out, watching the passage of its wraithlike body churn through the human’s open mouth like poisoned smoke. Archie went limp. Raw and Aaz released his legs, while Dek and Mal slithered off my shoulders, winding down my arms to be near my hands. Their tiny claws pricked my skin like kneading cats, and their soft, high-pitched hum of Bon Jovi’s “Social Disease” filled the air.

  When the last trail of the parasite’s writhing body was free of the human man, I held it in my hand with that soft, shrieking darkness spilling through my fingers, and felt a cold bite in my skin, like a glove of frozen nettles. Zee stepped over Archie’s still body, and the others extended their razor-tipped claws.

  I gave them the demon. I did not watch them eat it.

  I knelt by Archie and checked his pulse. Strong, steady. His eyelids fluttered, but he stayed unconscious, and I backed away quickly, rubbing my sweaty palms on my jeans. I had no way of knowing what this man had been like before being possessed, though I guessed he hadn’t been the happy type. Stable, mentally robust people did not get possessed by demons. Too much work. No cracks to exploit.

  But this man, Archie Limbaud, would wake up a murderer—and never know it. Demons left no memories in human minds. Just chaos, ruined lives. Friends and family who would never look at you the same way.

  “Maxine,” Zee rasped, rubbing his mouth with the back of his sharp hand. “Sun coming.”

  I knew. I could feel the sun, somewhere beyond the black skies and rain, slowly creeping up on the cloud-hidden horizon. I had minutes at most.

  “Pay phone,” I said to Zee, and he snapped his claws at Raw and Aaz, who were prowling the edges of the dark lot, slipping in and out of shadows. Both of them loped close, graceful as wolves, and whispered in Zee’s ears. Zee cocked his head, listening; and after a moment, pointed.

  I said nothing. Just walked away from Archie. I did not rush. I
did not look back. I held the handle of the switchblade and slid it into my hair. Listened to metal crunch as Mal chewed and swallowed. I could have left it. Evidence.

  But I wanted the man to have a second chance. I wanted him to wake up, confused and amnesiac, but without the burden of murder. No one deserved that—even though there was a small part of me that felt like his hands were dirty. Dirty as mine. I could not stop rubbing my palms against my wet jeans. Felt as though Archie Limbaud’s stink was all over me.

  Early morning continued to be quiet, the drizzling mist softening the streets and rough, broken edges, and I drank in the cold air, savoring the chill of wet hair curled against my flushed cheeks. The boys moved through the shadows, invisible except for brief glimpses of their red eyes. I kept wiping my hands and thinking about the dead girl. And my mother. She had warned me before she died. She had warned me it would be like this. Always, victims. Victims, everywhere. And me, never fast enough. Always playing catch-up.

  I found a pay phone two blocks away. Battered relic, covered in graffiti. I dialed 911 and left a brief message with the operator—teenager dead, murdered, several blocks south of Safeco Field—and hung up. Wiped off my prints, then remembered I could have worn my gloves. I was still rattled, not thinking straight. I wanted to go back to the dead girl and wait with her body—as if that would make a difference. Ease, somehow, the pain and loneliness of her murder.