Redemption Song (11 page)

I could have pointed out that we were on the second floor, making a tunnel a tricky setup, or that I’d crossed about fifty feet of real estate in less than a breath’s time, but I just nodded instead. He needed what he’d seen to be a trick. He needed it to be a trapdoor to keep his world from spiraling any further out of control tonight. So it was a trapdoor.

The Strip was a wonderland of light, a safe harbor stretching out its neon arms to embrace us. Traffic along the boulevard moved at a crawl, and men stood at every corner, clicking their little clickers and handing out laminated escort ads to anyone who stood still long enough to take one. We passed a Metro cop, who gave us both a casual once-over before turning his attention to a pack of drunken college kids farther down the sidewalk.

“Lose the dog collar, Padre,” I said. “You’re standing out in the crowd.”

Alvarez blinked and unfastened the white tab on his shirt. No good, he still looked like a priest even without the gear. Some people just have that air about them.

I led him into the Monaco, past a pair of towering Ionic columns. The casino swallowed us in cool blue lights and the electronic catcalls of a hundred slot machines all peacocking for the crowds. Right past the entrance to the casino’s theater was a bar with no name, a simple island of liquor in the middle of the concourse near the poker tables.

“Whiskey, neat,” I told the bartender, then nodded at Alvarez. “Same for him.”

I noted, wistfully, that I was acting like Caitlin in more ways than one tonight.

Fourteen

A
lvarez didn’t argue. His trembling hands needed a drink as badly as his overtaxed brain. I patted his shoulder and gestured to the doors.

“I need to make a quick phone call. Sit tight, drink up. I’ll be back in two minutes.”

I didn’t go too far, just enough to hear my own thoughts over the casino bustle. Then I called Nicky.

“Danny!” he said. “Where you been? I’ve been trying to—”

“In deep shit. They hit my place, Nicky. They burned it. I got out, got the priest out with me. We’re on the run.”

“How the hell did they find out where you live?”

“No idea.”

“They burned it? I mean, burned it for real?”

I thought about my place. It was cramped, stuffy, not much better than a transient hotel, but it was mine. I’d worked hard to make it a home. Worked harder to put together the rainy-day cash I’d sewn into a pocket under the mattress. Banks and people like me didn’t get along very well. That was all gone now. So were my books. Some of them first edition, some you couldn’t buy at any mortal price. All of my magical gear, my journals and notes.

I’d started out as a small-time grifter with twenty bucks and a deck of cards in my hip pocket. Now I was right back there again. Square zero.

At least I still had my cards.

“Yeah,” I said to Nicky. “Burned it. Listen, this priest’s a hot potato. I’ve got to get him off the street. We’re hiding in plain sight at the Monaco, but even the crowds here thin out eventually. Can you…?”

“Say no more. I’m sending a limo. Go outside in about twenty minutes, it’ll be there. I’ve got a safe house. It’s not far, but it’s off the grid. You can both crash there as long as you need to.”

Nicky sounded pleased that I was going to him for help. Maybe he thought I was sliding back under his thumb, right where he liked me. Truth was, the reason I didn’t call Bentley and Corman for shelter, or the rest of my family, was simple: if our hunters found me, they could find my family too. Nicky’s safety, I didn’t mind risking.

I met up with Alvarez at the bar. He was halfway down his first glass of whiskey. I thought it was his first glass, anyway. I took a swig of my own, letting it burn down my throat, cutting the tension like a hot knife.

“Cavalry’s coming,” I said. “We’re getting a ride out of here and a place to hole up.”

“Safer than the last one?” he asked. I didn’t blame him for sounding dubious. I changed the subject.

“I’ve been thinking. You said your hobby’s…translations, right?”

He nodded. “I don’t want to boast, but I’m fluent in several languages. My work’s been published in liturgical digests, here and there.”

“Do you ever, and forgive me for the phrasing, buy your source materials from anybody shady? Like, somebody who might have criminal connections? Smugglers, grave robbers, anybody like that?”

His eyes went wide. “Absolutely not! I mean, I don’t dig into the life stories of the people I buy from, but I’ve never heard anything disreputable about them.”

One more dead end for the pile.

“These translations, it’s all church history? Like, Pastor Zebediah’s Sunday sermon from a thousand years ago?”

“About that dry.” He chuckled, weakly. “Every now and then, though, I find something really entertaining, like the piece I’m working on now. It’s a Coptic Christian manuscript from around AD 1000, not long before a major schism in the church. The author was a bit touched in the head, but it makes for a great read. I’m still trying to find a journal who might want to publish it once I’m done, maybe as an April Fools’ article.”

I cradled my drink. “Yeah? What’s it about?”

“A road map to hell, if you can believe that.”

My fingers clenched around the glass.

“Road map?” I said, trying to sound casual.

“The author claimed there was a literal road to perdition, not far from Alexandria, and that he’d navigated it and returned to tell the tale. It’s not quite a ‘road,’ as such—it’s a list of landmarks and ritual steps to perform at each one, and the exact way to travel from point to point—but the end result, he claimed, would allow a soul to come and go from the underworld as they pleased.”

“The manuscript. Where is it right now?”

He caught the edge in my tone. His brow furrowed.

“It’s all nonsense, you understand. The poor man had spent too much time meditating out in the desert—”

“People murder each other over nonsense every single day. Where is the manuscript?”

“It’s in my office back at Our Lady,” he said, shaking his head. “But I don’t understand. Why would anyone go to these extremes for a little thing like that? All they had to do was ask, and I’d have happily shared it with them.”

“Sometimes it isn’t just about the having. Sometimes it’s about the keeping-it-away-from-somebody-else.”

I downed my drink and left a crumpled five on the bar for a tip. Maybe it was all a coincidence, maybe I was grasping at straws, but I had a hunch Father Alvarez’s innocent hobby had made him a marked man from here to the edge of hell.

Out in the valet drive, a sleek white limousine with livery plates waited near the end of the sidewalk. A buff guy in a gray jacket stood by the door, holding a hastily stenciled sign reading FAUST.

“That’s our ride,” I told Alvarez. “Don’t worry. You’re going to be safe now.”

The driver held open the door for us. I clambered in and stretched out my legs, happy for a little luxury.

I was less happy about the two men sitting across from us. One of them had a nasty little pistol aimed right at my face. The other was a demon.

He looked like a genteel, thin-faced man in his fifties, but he glowed like black diamonds, vibrant and seething in my second sight, a font of raw malice. His tailored suit was pure Savile Row, and he cradled a walking stick of polished mahogany in his slender hands.

“The answer to your first two questions,” he said in cultured, dulcet tones, “is yes.”

Alvarez noticed the gun as the passenger door slammed behind him, sealing us inside. The locks clicked shut in grim unison.

“What questions?” The priest looked at me.

I slumped back on the leather seat. “Question one: Is that an incarnate? Question two: Are we fucked?”

“An incarnate what?” Alvarez asked. The limo started to roll. The demon chuckled.

“You’ve kept the good father in the dark. Not surprising. Allow me to be the bringer of light. And the answer to your third question, Mr. Faust, is no. Nicky Agnelli did not betray you. He just has a leak in his fortress walls.”

“Someone, please,” Alvarez said, squirming in his seat, his head whipping from me to the gun and back again, “tell me what’s going on here.”

The demon twirled his walking stick in his hand. The silver tip resembled the head of a roaring lion.

“My name is
Suulivarishisian
, but I invite you to call me Sullivan, as my mortal friends do. I do hope we become good friends, Father. I am the leader of an organization called the Redemption Choir, and I am here to save your life.”

The Choir’s leader is a demon
, I thought. A demon at least as old and powerful as Caitlin. That kind of information was worth its weight in gold.

That was how I knew they’d never let me out of there alive.

“He,” Alvarez said, pointing at me, “is trying to save my life. You people were shooting at us!”

“We were shooting at
him
,” growled the cambion with the gun.

“I’m sorry,” Sullivan said. “My friends’ behavior was a bit…exuberant, shall we say? That’s why I’ve come to handle this business personally. Just in time, too. I hate to disappoint you, Father, but Mr. Faust here was sent to kill you.”

He looked at me, shocked. I shrugged.

“If I was going to kill you, I’d have done it by now,” I said.

“But you don’t deny,” Sullivan said, wrinkling his nose like he smelled something foul, “that you
were
sent to kill him.”

“I don’t work for Sitri.”

“Oh, if only that were true.
Caitlleanabruaudi
has her hooks in you, little man. I know her well. I
have known
her well.”

“I still don’t understand,” Alvarez pleaded.

The lighting in the limousine faded under layers of invisible spider silk. The air chilled and webs of frost condensed on the tinted windows as Sullivan removed his mask. His skin bubbled like a sheet of paper-thin leather laid over a boiling pot of water. Horns like bloody tusks pushed out of his temples, flesh melting to scabbed-over gristle. His nails lengthened in the dark, turning yellow, dripping with a viscous fluid that smelled like raw stomach bile.

“Be not afraid,” Sullivan said.

I would have gone for a gun, if I had one. Alvarez went for a rosary. He clutched the tiny wooden beads between his trembling fingers, stumbling over the first words of the Lord’s Prayer.

“Please, Father.” Sullivan looked tired. “Would you taunt a legless man with tales of running a marathon? Would you taunt me with images of divine love and grace? Have I done anything so cruel to you?”

Alvarez fell silent, still clinging to the rosary.

Sullivan waved his clawed hand. “Theological question for you. If an angel can fall from heaven’s grace, can a demon hope to climb? Can one born in perdition, created in a state of inherent sin, even aspire to rise above his nature? Or is the love of God a forlorn hope?”

The priest had to think about that.

“I don’t know.” Alvarez spoke slow, thoughtful, still terrified but in his element now. “And it would be wrong of me to claim knowledge I don’t possess. But the Lord loves everyone, even those who have turned away from him. No hope is forlorn, if it springs from honesty and love. Hope is what keeps the world alive.”

“And what of a man,” Sullivan said, pointedly staring at me, “who has every advantage, every opportunity to seek grace, and throws it away at every turn? What of a man who only thrives in the darkness, who consorts with thieves and whores and killers, who lies, cheats, steals, and shares his heart and his bed with the powers of evil?”

Alvarez rubbed his chin.

“Then I would pray for him,” the priest said, “because he, too, can be forgiven.”

Sullivan frowned. He leaned back, clutching the walking stick between his knees.

“I’m starting to think,” I said, “that you people don’t like me very much.”

“Demonfucker,” spat the cambion with the gun.

I sighed, turning to Alvarez. “It’s like the old joke says. You build a hundred bridges, nobody calls you Daniel the Bridge Builder, but you sleep with just
one
demon—”

“There’s nothing amusing about what you do,” Sullivan said. “My friends, my flock, they carry a taint in their blood that they never wanted and never asked for. All they want is to be pure, to be human. You flaunt your perversion in their faces.”

I tilted my head toward him. “So what’s your story, Big and Ugly? If you want to be human, you’d better go buy a house in the suburbs, play golf, and cheat on your taxes, because that’s the closest you’re ever gonna get.”

“Let me shoot him,” the cambion hissed. I didn’t like how the gun wavered in his hand. His fingers were too tight, and the trigger was too easy.

Sullivan shook his head and rested a calming hand on the halfblood’s shoulder. “No. He has a purpose yet.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. In my experience, when your enemies get the drop on you and don’t kill you, that’s when they’ve got something much, much nastier waiting in the wings.

Fifteen

A
desert nightscape slid by outside the tinted glass. Nothing but sand and red rock mountains as far as the eye could see. Wherever we were going, we’d put the bright lights of Vegas far behind us.

“It took me a while,” I said, “but I figured it out. You’re working with Lauren Carmichael, and Pinfeather’s your inside man.”

Sullivan raised an eyebrow.

I held up a finger. “You knew about this limo, because the FBI task force is tapping Nicky’s phones. Your inside guy, the cambion on the force—that’s Pinfeather. He heard about the limo, realized it was for us, and called you. Except he’s also in Lauren’s pocket, because she pulled the strings to get the task force up and rolling in the first place. That tells me that you and Lauren are getting cozy, and I’m willing to bet that the good father’s road map to hell is the reason why.”

“So close to the truth,” the demon said, “and yet so tragically far. Your life story, if I’m not mistaken. No, Mr. Faust, I have no intention of regaling you with the intricacies of my master plan. You will be confined until you are useful, and then you will die.”