Which meant I had to kill him quick.

The silver-loaded blade dragged across easily, parting helltainted flesh. A gush of hot, black-tinged blood sprayed out. Human blood looks black at night, but the darkness of hellbreed ichor tainting a Trader’s vital fluids is in a class all its own.

Arterial spray goes amazingly far, especially when you have the rest of the body under tension and the head wrenched all the way back. The body slumped in my hands, a gurgle echoing against rooftop and girders, twitches racing through as corruption claimed the flesh. I used to think that if Traders could see one of them biting it and the St. Vitus’s dance of contagion that eats up their tissues, they might think twice about making a bargain with hellbreed.

I don’t think that anymore. Because really, what Trader thinks they’re going to die? That’s why they Trade—they think the rules don’t apply to them. Every single one of them, you see, is special. A special little snowflake, entitled to kill, rape, terrify, and use whoever and whatever they want.

They think they can escape consequences. Sometimes they do.

But not while I’m around.

My legs didn’t work too well. I scrabbled back from the body, a knife hilt in either fist. Fetched up against the brick wall, right next to the indent from earlier. Sobbing breaths as my own body struggled for oxygen, my eyes locked to the Trader’s form as it disappeared into a slick of bubbling black grease starred with scorched, twisting bones.

Watch, milaya. My teacher’s voice, quietly, inside my head. You watch the death you make. Is only way.

I watched until there was nothing recognizably human left. Even the bones dissolved, and by daybreak there would be only a lingering foulness to the air up here. I checked the angle of the building—any sunlight that came through the network of girders would take care of the rest. If the bones had remained I would’ve had to call up some banefire, to deny whatever hellbreed he’d Traded with the use of a nice fresh zombie corpse.