Redemption Song (21 page)

Despite her official rank in the Court of Night-Blooming Flowers, Naavarasi was right when she said we were birds of a feather. I’d just handed a political boon to a relative outsider, which meant Malphas’s loyal cronies might not be feeling too kindly toward me right now. There was also the chance that the rakshasi might waylay me on the road to bust our deal and take de Rais’s soul back, but I didn’t count that as a worry. She’d been earnest, in her way. Her offer to recruit me was as genuine as they came.

Then there was the fact that she’d been keeping tabs on me for years, and I’d only found out she existed a couple of days ago. She had personal details about my relationships that only my close friends should have known.

“So you’ve got a stalker,” I said to my reflection in the rearview mirror. “And she eats people. Great.”

I unwrapped my burger and took a bite. It tasted like cardboard and ashes. I thought back to the taste of Naavarasi’s dish, the succulent meat, the perfect, almost overwhelming blend of spices.

For a second, just a second, I wanted to turn the car around and drive back to Denver. I shut my eyes and rested my forehead against the cool, hard steering wheel until the moment passed. Then I forced down my burger and fries, trying to remind myself what food was supposed to taste like.

I got back on the road. I even managed a smile. For the first time in days, things were starting to turn my way. With Gilles de Rais out of the picture, Lauren’s plans for the Enclave would grind to a standstill. That also meant she had no reason to get into bed with Sullivan and the Redemption Choir.

Now to brace for the blowback. In my experience, not even high school students gossip like demons do. One way or another, Lauren and Sullivan would find out what I’d done, and when they did they’d come for Gilles de Rais. Lauren, because she needed him, and Sullivan, because he could trade the bottled soul to Lauren in exchange for the Ring of Solomon. That little glass bottle had just become the hottest potato in town.

I couldn’t keep it on me, and I didn’t have a home to stash it in anymore. Hiding it at Bentley and Corman’s place was out of the question. They were in enough danger as it was, ditto for anybody else in my inner circle. I needed to bury the bottle deep, stash it someplace Lauren wouldn’t think to look, or wouldn’t be able to go.

I turned the problem around in my head as the miles slid by. What I really needed, I realized, was to stash the bottle with somebody who had no connection to me or my friends, was absolutely trustworthy, and was capable of defending himself if my enemies tracked the prize to his front doorstep.

Good luck with that
, I thought.
Sounds like I need an Eagle Scout, and I don’t know any
—

Yes, I did.

I pulled over at a Utah rest stop, nothing but cornfields and blue sky as far as the eye could see. Then I dialed the operator and asked for the Las Vegas field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“Yes, hello. I’m looking for Special Agent Harmony Black. I believe she’s temporarily working out of your office. Tell her it’s Daniel Faust. Yes. Yes, I’ll hold.”

I tapped my toe to the elevator music for a few minutes. Then the line clicked twice and the music died.

“Faust?” Harmony said. “You should use the number on the card I gave you. It’s my direct line.”

“Would love to, but I put it in my wallet. Wallet’s gone. So’s just about everything else. I’ve been having a rough week.”

“There was an altercation at an apartment building off Bermuda Road. Would you know anything about that?”

“What am I?” I said. “Public enemy number one? Sheesh, you’ll blame me for just about anything.”

“A blazing fire, eyewitness reports of billowing green smoke. And when the smoke cleared, do you know what was left behind? Two dead cambion.”

I frowned. She was way more clued-in than she had any right to be.

“You know what cambion are, huh?”

“I know what cambion are,” she said. “Like Nicky Agnelli, for instance. Let’s not mince words. I know what you are. You know what I am. We don’t have to put on the mystery act for each other.”

“Fine by me. If you want blunt, try this on for size: you’re being played. This little ‘task force’ of yours came courtesy of a government bribe from Lauren Carmichael. She’s stalling for time and throwing up roadblocks—”

“You think I don’t know that?” Harmony said.

For a second, I was speechless.

“You…knew?”

“Carmichael is one of Senator Roth’s biggest campaign donors. She pulled strings with Roth to form the task force. I pulled strings to get
on
it. Seattle’s my home office, Faust. Digging into Carmichael-Sterling’s been my vocation for the past three years. Whatever nastiness you think she’s into, believe me, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. I came here to find out what she’s planning for Vegas and to shut it down cold. Putting Nicky and his whole crew, including you, behind bars is just a bonus.”

“The charges will never stick,” I said.

“Oh? There’s other ways of taking down a criminal. Accidents happen all the time.”

“Not around you, they don’t. You don’t even carry a drop piece. You never would.”

“And how do you know that?” she said.

“Because I’m good at reading people. It makes me money. And what I get from you, Agent Black, is that you’re one of the good guys. Last of a dying breed. You do things the right way, or you don’t do them at all.”

Harmony didn’t answer right away.

“I suppose that makes me a sucker, in your book.”

“What it makes you,” I said, “is useful. Because much as it pains me to say it, what I need right now is one of the good guys. What if I said that I could hand you, no strings attached, a means of screwing with Lauren’s plans?”

“I’d say I wasn’t born yesterday, but even so, we should meet. Not at the field office. I don’t trust the locals. Carmichael likes to spread her money around. Where are you now?”

“Out of state, but I’ll be back tonight.”

“You know the underground parking garage at the Metropolitan? Meet me there. Nine A.M.tomorrow, fourth level.”

I leaned back in my seat. “Clandestine meetings in a parking garage? Which one of us is Deep Throat?”

“Like you said. I do things the right way, or I don’t do them.”

“This is between you and me, right? You’ll leave your buddies at home?”

“If you do,” she said.

“Deal.”

I hung up the phone.

I had a good reason for keeping her partners out of the loop. I had to assume Harmony didn’t know Gary was a cambion himself, much less who he was reporting to. He was still my inside man on the task force, whether he wanted to be or not. Even so, I didn’t want him to know about the hand-off. If he thought Lauren could protect him, he might do something reckless to get his hands on that bottle.

The Barracuda barreled down the highway, and I fiddled with the radio until I found a scratchy backwater blues station. B.B. King’s guitar played me across the Nevada state line and howled out over the desert, while the setting sun washed the world in shades of blood and gold.

A couple of hours later, when the sky had gone black and left me navigating by highway reflectors, my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello?”

“Daniel,” Emma said. “I talked to Caitlin. Is it true? Is it over?”

I considered my words carefully. Sitri and I had put a lot of moving pieces into play when we made our little deal, and keeping them all on the table meant I had to lie like a politician.

“Everything happens for a reason. That’s what I’m told, anyhow.”

“That won’t do at all,” she said. “Not one bit. We have to get you two back together again.”

I forced a chuckle. “I’m open to suggestions.”

“Come over for dinner tonight.”

“I’m driving in from out of town. I won’t be back for a while yet.”

“Ben and I are working late, doing quarterly projections. We’ll wait up for you. Please, Daniel. Do us the honor.”

“All right,” I said. “I suppose I could use the company.”

Besides, after enjoying Naavarasi’s hospitality, spending some time with a normal family sounded like a fine way to spend the evening. Okay, relatively normal family.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was the calm before the storm.

Cicadas trilled in the dark as I rumbled up to Emma and Ben’s driveway. They lived in a respectable tan stucco house in a respectable suburban tract, the picture of upper-middle-class domestic bliss. They even had a minivan parked in the driveway with a bumper sticker reading “Our Daughter is an Honor Student at Palo Verde High School.”

Ben met me at the front door. He pumped my hand like a salesman and patted me on the back as he led me inside.

“Good to see you, buddy!” he said. “Hope you like pasta. I don’t cook small batches. Italian mom, can’t be helped.”

Emma sat hunched over a spray of documents at a glass dining table, squinting behind a pair of silver-rimmed bifocals. Their living room opened onto a gourmet kitchen with a floating island, white carpet separated from russet tile by an elegant curve of brass trim.

She gave me a tired wave and said, “Just in time to save us. All the numbers are starting to blur.”

“Long day?” I said. Ben walked around the table, leaning in to kiss Emma on the cheek. He slipped into the kitchen and pulled down a clutter of herbs and spices from the cabinets.

“Long day, long night,” Emma said. “Trying to meet our budget quotas for the next quarter. The prince’s earthbound operations don’t fund themselves.”

“Isn’t that what Southern Tropics is for?”

“It’s a shell company. A front. We make money through investments, mostly, and those investments have to stay low-profile.”

“What we need,” Ben said from the kitchen, “is a bigger piece of Silicon Valley. We’re playing too conservatively.”

“Not having that argument again, sweetie,” Emma said with a glance in his direction. “Anyway, the Court of Windswept Razors is eating our lunch in terms of funding, and the prince is unhappy.”

That name was a new one. “Razors? What’s their story?”

“Small court, but they control New York,” Emma said.

“Wall Street,” Ben added. “They make so much money they might as well have a printing press.”

“Makes me sick to my stomach,” Emma said. “But enough of that. Let’s talk about you, and how we’re going to fix things for my dear Caitlin. Before she kills us all.”

Twenty-Eight

T
he story I spun for Emma and Ben was a custom-tailored version of the truth. Just factual enough to stand up under scrutiny, just enough of a lie to protect the secrets that needed protecting.

“…So Lauren and Sullivan both want Gilles de Rais’s soul, and so does Prince Sitri. After all, Lauren did try to drag him to Earth and enslave him a few weeks ago. He likes the idea of throwing a wrench in her plans.”

“That sounds like him,” Emma said. “So he’ll accept that as your service, in lieu of the priest’s death?”

“It looks like it, but I’m covering all my bases—”

“Do you have the soul? Where is it now?” she asked, a little too urgently for my liking.

“Stashed someplace safe,” I told her. That someplace was the trunk of my car parked out in the driveway, but I didn’t feel like sharing that much.

To pull them off the subject, I told them about my road trip to Denver, starting with my run-in with Mack and Zeke at the diner.

“Satanists?” Ben said while he chopped onions on a white plastic cutting board. “Really? Wow. That’s so eighties.”

Emma smiled, shaking her head. “The sad thing is, while we’ve sponsored certain musicians over the years, I don’t think we’ve ever dipped our toes into heavy metal. Too obvious. Country and western, on the other hand…”

“Prince Sitri in a ten-gallon hat. There’s a mental image I didn’t need,” I said.

“On the plus side,” Ben said, “have to give those kids credit for knowing which way the wind’s blowing, even if they’re a little misguided. The planet’s already lost. There’s no shame in joining the winning team.”

Nice as Ben was, I couldn’t help but imagine him happily informing on his neighbors in Nazi-occupied France instead of taking up arms with the resistance. I couldn’t say a damn thing, though. It wasn’t like I had a moral leg to stand on.

“So a source tipped me off as to where I could find de Rais’s owner,” I said. “A rakshasi out in Denver named Naavarasi.”

I gave them a quick rundown of the deal, but I left out the part where I blew the cover of one of Sitri’s agents. I’d have to explain where I’d gotten the agent’s name in the first place, and that would have been awkward. Instead, I told them Naavarasi had been willing to hand over the soul in exchange for a favor to be named later.

“She’s itching to make a move against Prince Malphas,” I explained. “I figure she’s lining up as much magical firepower as she can get. Saving favors for a rainy day.”

“Still,” Emma said, gently chiding, “you know it’s never a wise deal, trading a certainty now for a mystery later. I suppose you did what you had to do. I’m just worried about the eventual consequences, and Caitlin will be too. I’ve heard of Naavarasi. All of her species are natural illusionists and tricksters, but she’s a breed apart. Mind games are her specialty.”

“I got that impression, yeah.”

“That hall and back room that was too big to fit in the building? I wouldn’t be surprised if you were ushered into a broom closet and hallucinated the entire thing. She can do that.”

“The food,” I said with a faint shudder of mingled craving and revulsion, “was real. I’m sure of it.”

Emma shook her head. “She probably fed you perfectly ordinary lamb, just to mess with you. Really, I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.”

Easy for her to say.

“Speaking of perfectly ordinary food,” Ben said, carrying over a steaming ceramic serving bowl. “Pasta fagioli!”

Emma clapped her hands and cleared away the scattered papers, bundling them into a neat stack. “Perfectly delicious, you mean. I’ll open a bottle of wine.”

Ben dished out the food, and I noticed he gave Emma a slightly bigger serving. Living with an envy demon, moves like that would come automatically over time, I figured. The pasta was good. The company was better. We got off the shoptalk and acted like three regular people for a night. We talked about television shows I hadn’t seen and the latest government scandal, and once we were done eating Emma broke out another bottle of wine while Ben rummaged in the hall closet for a Scrabble board.