Free Flesh Circus by Lilith Saintcrow Page A

Everything went sideways.”
    Sort-of apprentice? That doesn’t happen.
But there are wannabes in this business, just the same as any other. Fucking amateurs trying to get themselves killed, since
     they’re unfit for the job one way or another, or they’d be trained.
    Silence stretched between us. I finally broke it. “Mikhail never told me about that.”
    “He wasn’t an
actual
apprentice.” The kitchen, with its mellow shining counters and wood-faced cabinets, wavered slightly and solidified around
     her. “He just kept following Sloane around until Sloane gave up and began training him.”
    That’s how it usually starts.
My own apprenticeship hadn’t begun that way, but… Mikhail had been an exception all over.
    And so, I suppose, was I. And if I was lucky, Gilberto would have vanished off my front step by the time I got home.
    Galina sighed. “He got into trouble. There were some problems.”
    “What type of problems?”
    Her brow furrowed. “I… didn’t hear much. Sloane never opened up about it. I do know the kid ended up dead, after something
     terrible.”
    There’s certainly no shortage of terrible things on the nightside.
“And no word on what ‘something terrible’ entailed? Did it have to do with the Cirque, or—”
    “I just don’t know, Jill.” She picked up her own cup, took a small sip. Her shoulders were sharp points under the robes. Some
     of the shaking had eased out of her. The walls had stopped quivering with etheric distress. “The Ringmaster seemed to think
     you had a hand in this attack, and he was… excited when he showed up. Perry was right behind him.”
    Goddammit. I’ll just bet he was, with his little fingers in the pie as usual.
I couldn’t help myself—a sigh to match hers came out hard on the end of the sentence. The smell of incense, dust, and sleepy
     power in her shop mixed uneasily with the aroma of spaghetti sauce and the fading tang of ’breed—she’d probably been at dinner
     when they dropped by. “What can you tell me about this trouble?”
    The line between her eyebrows got deeper. “Not much that I can recall. It had to do with the apprentice and a woman over near
     Greenlea, I think, back when that part of town wasn’t very nice. Had to be, oh, around 1926 or so. Before the barrio moved,
     before the big outbreak, and before all that new money moved in and turned it into a shopping district. The kid…” She
     frowned. “There was something about him. I can’t remember. I’ll dig through my diaries, see if I can suss it out.”
    Hm.
“It’s not like you to have a bad memory.”
    She gave me an exquisitely sarcastic look. “When you’ve put in almost a century of tending a Sanctuary, Jill, then we’ll talk.
     Mikhail and Sloane both liked things close to the vest, too. Most of the time I didn’t have a clue what either of them were
     up to.”
    And I was no different when a case was heating up. It was my turn to shrug as I finished stowing the ammo. “Mischa was a private
     person, all right. I didn’t hear much about the former hunter either. Except that Sloane wasn’t of our lineage, he was part
     of Ben Cross’s crowd.”
    “Yes. Sloane died after the outbreak in 1929.” She stared into her tea mug like it held the secrets of the universe. “We were
     in freefall for years. That was a bad time for any hunter.”
    “Yeah.” The second-biggest demonic outbreak of the past century, 1929 was a bad year for hunters all over the United States,
     and it got exponentially worse in Europe ten years later. So much of what was unleashed during the two decades after ’29 is
     still out running around—it’s like the Middle Ages all over again, only this time we have more firepower to put things down.
    Still, the firepower’s no good without people trained to use it. And quality apprentices are few and far between.
    I thought again of Gilberto and hoped he was gone by the time I got home. Which might not be soon. This had all the