Redemption Song (27 page)

I tried to speak, but it burst out in a gasping wheeze. My breath came back slowly, escorted by a flood of black spots in my vision. Gilles drew his own pistol from his shoulder holster, studying it curiously.

“War has become the province of peasants in this day,” he said with a tinge of regret. “The sword, the lance, those are a real man’s weapons. Weapons of skill and courage. Now you forge portable cannons and allow any fool to carry one in his pocket. Is it any wonder that the right of kings is a distant memory?”

“We like our violence democratic these days,” I said. “It’s fairer to everybody that way.”

He tossed his gun to the mattress, joining mine. Still on the floor, propping myself up with my arms behind me, I knew I didn’t have a chance of getting past him to grab either piece. He knew it too. Gilles pulled a stick of polished bone from his back pocket, unfolding it to reveal the blade of a serrated hunting knife.

“In Baron Naavarasi’s hell I learned new appreciation for the blade,” he said. “Do you know that it’s possible to dress a man like a deer? And that in skilled hands, the entire process can be accomplished in less than ten minutes?”

“Didn’t know that. Then again, didn’t want to.”

He tested his thumb against the blade’s edge, gently running skin across the steel. He nodded approvingly.

“The true mark of a master, though, is the ability to skin a man while keeping him alive, awake and screaming. Blood loss kills quickly, you see, and the victim’s thrashing can mar or ruin the pelt. It’s a technique I’ve always wanted to try, and now that I’m back in the land of the flesh…”

I thought fast, grasping at straws.

“I know Naavarasi,” I said. “We’re on good terms. She’ll be cross if you kill me.”

He shrugged. “She’s not my mistress anymore. My contract is in Sullivan’s hands. I don’t answer to the rakshasi.”

“Pretty sure Sullivan wanted to kill me himself. He’s gonna be pretty unhappy with you.”

“And yet he gave no orders on the matter.” Gilles took a step closer and brandished the knife. “And without a direct order, I am free to do as I please. You should be honored, you know. You will be my first mortal victim in centuries. You may be a filthy peasant, but you will die at the hands of a true nobleman. There is honor in that.”

My ears perked. A sound in the distance, rising with the pounding of my pulse. Just in the nick of time.

“One last thing,” I said.

He paused, poised above me and ready to cut.

“What you said back there, about needing an army to take you on?”

“
Oui
?”

Scarlet lights strobed across the curtains, and sirens wailed like banshees in the dark. Squad cars flooded the parking lot, rolling in one after another. I heard doors rattle and slam as the local population of roaches tried to cut and run, charging headlong into the dragnet of a full-on police raid.

“I brought one,” I told him.

Gilles blinked and looked stupidly over his shoulder, trying to parse what was happening. That was when the door burst in and Harmony stood on the threshold, flanked by a pair of Metro cops in uniform.

“You caught him!” Harmony said, giving Gilles an approving nod. “Good job, Agent Jakobsen. This scumbag isn’t getting away again.”

“Wait,” Gilles said. “What…what is…?”

One of the uniforms hoisted me to my feet and tugged my hands behind me. Cold steel ratcheted shut around my wrists, tight enough to squeeze. Harmony plucked my gun from the mattress. A cacophony of shouts and stampeding feet echoed from outside the motel room. I saw a rail-thin junkie with a swastika tattoo on his neck streak past the doorway, only to meet the wrong end of a Taser and go down in a twitching heap.

“You’re Agent Lars Jakobsen of the DEA,” Harmony said to Gilles with a cold smile. “And you just masterminded a major drug bust. I bet this perp over here is the leader of the whole meth ring.”

Gilles leaned close to Harmony, looming over her.

“What are you playing at, woman?” he whispered hoarsely.

“Remember that little stunt at the parking garage?” she whispered back. “Now it’s your turn. You can play along, or you can show all these heavily armed officers what you really are. Your choice.”

He straightened, looking from me to her with narrowed eyes. He knew he’d been set up, but he couldn’t figure out the how or the why.

“Fine,” he grumbled. “You can take him in. I have…paperwork. Police paperwork.”

“Nonsense,” Harmony said. “This is your collar, your interrogation. I’ll be right there to help, of course, but you should really see this through to the end.”

That was how Harmony, me, and the spirit of Gilles de Rais ended up in an unmarked police car, with a clueless uniformed rookie riding along for support.

The night was just getting started.

Thirty-Five

T
he raid hadn’t been subtle. I counted four patrol cars riding convoy with us, and every one had at least two ragged-looking skells in the backseat. Eventually we arrived at the nearest precinct house, an imposing block of weathered granite behind a barbed-wire fence. I ducked my head as Harmony hauled me out of the car.

Past the concrete crash barriers and the reinforced Plexiglas doors, the seal of the State of Nevada adorned the dirty and scuffed tile floor. The room was a human zoo. The takings from the raid on the Honeydew only added to a chaotic whirlwind of surly, handcuffed perps, frantic public defenders, and a handful of third-shift cops just trying to keep their heads above water. Harmony walked me past the front desk and over to a side door, pausing to flash her badge at an attendant.

“Federal prisoner here,” she told him. “Can we use one of your interrogation rooms?”

He checked a clipboard and nodded. “Four should be open. Down on the end, left side.”

We paused at a hard plastic box set into the wall. Harmony drew her gun and turned her back to us. I heard the box rattle and clank. She looked expectantly at Gilles.

“What?” he said.

“You know the rules, agent,” she said. “No weapons in the squad room. Stow your piece.”

He nodded slowly, shouldering past her and stashing his gun in the secure box. It rattled and clanked once more, and Harmony nodded for him to lead the way inside.

“So now I don’t have a cannon,” he muttered at her. “Neither do you. A feeble woman and a shackled man against a Marshal of France. That was your grand plan?”

Harmony half smiled. “Do you have a problem with women in authority, Gilles? I thought you fought under Joan of Arc.”

He grumbled something in French. I didn’t understand a word of it, but the tone came across loud and clear.

We walked past cluttered desks and a broken coffee machine, turning left down a cinder-block hallway. The door to interrogation room four hung open. The empty room looked just like the last one I’d been in: steel table, steel chairs, cold and sterile behind a one-way mirror.

I walked in first, standing off to one side. Gilles came next, smirking as Harmony pulled the door closed.

“I see,” he said. “A soundproof box. Cunning. Now which of you shall I murder firs—”

I lashed out my fist, whipping him across the eyes with the steel handcuffs I suddenly wasn’t wearing anymore. His hands flew up to protect his face. Harmony gave him a vicious kick to the back of his knee. His leg buckled and he crashed to the concrete floor. He reared back, roaring with anger and surprise, and I stuck a gun in his face.

“You forgot to search your prisoner,” I breathed. “That’s bad police technique.”

Harmony slapped cuffs on his wrists, bound by a sturdy chain in the middle that ran through a bolt riveted to the floor. These were the heavy-duty shackles, the kind for hard-core violent felons. In three quick breaths she had him trussed like a Thanksgiving turkey.

“
Non
,” he groaned, shaking his head. “
Non, non
,
non
! How? How did you—”

“Magic,” I said, and it was true in a way.

Back in the day, and I mean way back, Bentley had a vaudeville routine. Sort of a low-rent Houdini. Thing is, a lot of escapology tricks have valuable real-world applications for guys in my line of work. Like for instance, the fact that handcuff keys are universal. If you keep one stuck to the inside of your belt with a blob of putty, slipping out of a pair of cuffs just takes a little practice and a few seconds of distraction.

As far as the chrome-plated .22 in my hand, that was easy: Harmony had slipped it into my pocket when she shoved me into the car back at the motel. I knew Gilles would be too arrogant to actually learn anything about how a real cop would operate, and he wouldn’t think to search me. Too late now.

“Speaking of magic,” Harmony said. She marched to the one-way window and licked her fingertip, drawing a swirling rune across the glass in spittle. She whispered sibilant words under her breath, and the winds of power rose and tingled like static electricity against my skin. A rime of frost spread across the mirror’s face, turning the glass pearly white. She paused, studied her handiwork for a moment, and left the room.

I pulled up a chair and straddled it, keeping the gun on Gilles.

“Alone again,” I said.

“What now?” he demanded. “Shoot me? I’ll just jump into another body, and this man, an innocent, will be dead.”

“Right. See, Harmony is pretty tight with Lars—”

“Aha! See? You don’t dare shoot.”

“—which is why I’m the one with the gun,” I said. “Not her. She couldn’t pull the trigger on her buddy. I can.”

His smile of triumph faded a bit.

“This is the last resort,” I told him. “Just in case.”

“Just in case of what?”

The door rattled and Harmony came back in, toting a pair of brown paper grocery bags. She set them both on the table. She reached into the bag on the left. Mama Margaux’s spirit-bottle glittered in her hand, the glass festooned with a rainbow of sequins and dripping with the magic of prisons, the haunted echoes of red bricks and black iron. She set it down where Gilles could get a good look.

“In case we have trouble fitting you into your new home,” I said.

I peeked into the other bag. Harmony had brought everything I asked for. I took out a slender blue glass flask of perfumed water and walked around Gilles in a slow, steady circle, splashing droplets on the floor.

“You’re mad!” Gilles cried, thrashing against his shackles. “You can’t do this to me! I’m a nobleman!”

Next came the chant, words spitting from my lips in guttural grunts. The language was Germanic, but the rhyme was older, more primal, from a cold and bitter age. I opened a canister of sea salt from the bag, wet my fingertips with the last of the perfumed water, and dipped them in. Then I gripped Gilles’s chin with my other hand and smeared a blasphemous sign across his forehead in salt, the crystals suddenly sharp as a hundred tiny razor blades. I pulled my bloody fingers away as Gilles let out a shriek.

As I cursed, Harmony beckoned. She sang, waving her pale, long-fingered hands across the surface of the sequined bottle, making them glitter in response to her gentle voice. She sang of the sea, of movement, of grace, in words I felt more than understood.

“Please,” Gilles screamed as rivulets of salty blood ran down his face. “Please, I don’t want to go back. I’m begging you. I don’t want to go back—”

As my voice grew more strident Harmony’s grew softer, yet somehow still keeping pace, spinning through the room, weaving between the jagged consonants of my cursework. My spell washed over Gilles’s stolen body, poisoning the meat and spreading toxins through muscles and bone. Harmony’s fingers spun the bottle into a glimmering beacon, a lighthouse on a distant shore offering serenity. We spiraled upward, upward, reaching a sudden crescendo that ended as we both spoke the same word at the same moment.

“
Go
.”

Gilles lurched forward as his spirit boiled out of Lars’s body in a violet cloud. It streamed from his mouth, his nose, his ears and eyes, tendrils slithering from under his fingernails to join the growing mass. Like a fish on a hook, the roiling cloud flew toward the open mouth of the bottle. As the last glimmering mote slipped inside, Harmony slammed in the cork.

I slumped against the wall, spent, my shirt caked to my body with cold fever-sweat. Harmony flopped back in her chair, panting.

Then Lars opened his eyes, reared back as he drew a desperate gasp of air, and threw up.

I stumbled over and patted his back. “That’s it. Get it all out. Had to make your body an unhappy place to live. You’ll be feeling queasy for a couple of days, but it’s better than the alternative.”

The burly Norwegian wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He sat there, mute with shock, and shook his head. When he could finally speak, his words came out in fits and starts, like he was learning how to speak all over again.

“I couldn’t…I couldn’t do anything. It was like I was a…prisoner behind my own eyes. I tried to fight, but…I couldn’t.”

I looked at Harmony and said, “You’re gonna need to have a long talk with this guy. Not fair not to clue him in. Not after what he’s been through.”

“I know,” she said softly.

“Listen,” I told Lars. “Bottom line is, you’re gonna be okay. You might have some rough nights for a while, but you’ll get past this.”

I didn’t tell him that my nightmares never went away. He’d earned a little hope, even if it wasn’t true.

“Was that…was that some kind of demon?” he said.

I looked over at the bottle and shook my head. “No. No, that was just a major-league asshole. You got someplace we can stash this, Agent Black?”

Harmony nodded grimly.

“I’ve got the perfect place,” she said. “Bottom of a cardboard box in an evidence room dedicated to cold cases. They told me a light blew out in there once, and it took five months before anyone even noticed.”

“Good deal. Hey, we worked pretty well back there together.”

She glowered at me, but she was too exhausted to put much anger into it. “Don’t make it a bigger deal than it was.”

“All right, all right. Lars, Harmony is going to bring you up to speed, but we’re pressed for time, so here’s the short version: the dead guy who was running around in your skin is a bargaining chip between a couple of world-class menaces to society. We’ve just taken that chip off the table, but they don’t know that.”